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Content "MI BIBLIA LITERARIA": THE LITERARY RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN JOHN DOS PASSOS AND
CARLOS FUENTES
by
Mary Magdalena Chavarria
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
Copyright 1992
May 1992
Mary Magdalena Chavarria
UMI Number: DP23166
All rights reserved
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This dissertation, written by
under the direction of h.&x Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements fo r the degree of
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C 510.
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D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean o f Graduate Studies
D a te Ap.ri]...17A..1.992
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
11
Page
ABSTRACT......................................... iii
PREFACE........................................... v
CHAPTER
I JOHN DOS PASSOS, CARLOS FUENTES, AND
THE QUESTION OF LITERARY INFLUENCE 1
II CARLOS FUENTES IN THE CONTEXT OF
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY NOVEL............ 47
III ENGAGES AND DEGAGt: IDEOLOGY AND
JOHN DOS PASSOS....................... 79
IV A REVOLUTIONARY FORM FOR A
REVOLUTIONARY VIEW: IDEOLOGY AND
CARLOS FUENTES........................ 124
V "READING" THE LITERARY BIBLE: JOHN
DOS PASSOS AND CARLOS FUENTES........... 162
NOTES............................................. 185
WORKS CITED...................................... 188
APPENDIX.......................................... 200
ABSTRACT
I
I
, I
This dissertation discusses the literary |
I
i relationship between John Dos Passos and Carlos Fuentes,
; and argues that Fuentes' early reading of Dos Passos'
{ four major novels— Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A.
x I
! trilogy— has resulted in a compelling example of what
j comparative literary inquiry identifies as an .
international literary influence, and of the cultural
I .
j dialectic of inter-American literary relations.
i In an interview given for this dissertation, Fuentes
i
identifies four areas that Dos Passos' novels helped him
! re-formulate for the writing of his novels: the
t invention of the city in the novel, the rise of the
’ Mexican bourgeoisie, different uses of time and the urban
j
j experience, and the tradition of the urban novel.
i
| The analysis focuses on selected non-fiction, the
i
J
| major fiction, critical and political essays, and
i
i interviews given by Dos Passos and Fuentes. Unlike
previous studies, this dissertation does not stress ;
similarities, but the differences between Dos Passos and ■
!
Fuentes. Fuentes does not imitate Dos Passos; instead, ,
Fuentes diverges from Dos Passos to assert Latin American J
cultural autonomy.
Chapter I discusses the issues of influence, inter-
American literary contacts, and ideology. An overt
j political ideology in Dos Passos that is similar to
I Fuentes7 is discussed as one reason for the appeal Dos
1
I Passos7 novels have had for Fuentes.
}
j Chapter II critically discusses how the influence of
I
j Dos Passos on Fuentes has been previously treated,
i
I pointing out the Eurocentric position of early
' scholarship on their literary relationship.
I
j Chapters III and IV discuss the ideological
i
! imperatives that gave rise to Dos Passos7 and Fuentes7
I
j fiction, respectively.
I
j Chapter V discusses the interview Fuentes gave for
this study and details what the interview reveals about
the dialectic of John Dos Passos7 influence on Carlos
Fuentes.
i
PREFACE
This dissertation raises two questions about the
literary relationship between John Dos Passos and Carlos
Fuentes. These questions stem from the dialectics of
literary influence within the context of inter-American
literary relations. Broadly defined, literary influence
is one of a number of literary relations or contacts that
have traditionally been identified as conceivably
existing between national literatures, and it in general
occurs when an author or work originating within one
national literature contributes to a new development in
another national literature. The new development may be
seen in a single writer or in the writing of an entire
period. As the type of contact between John Dos Passos
and Carlos Fuentes, literary influence specifies that Dos
* Passos' novels have become an organic part of Fuentes'
i
! narrative voice and vision. Studies of literary
influence attempt to understand why a foreign literature
J is able to affect another literary tradition so as to
J become an inseparable part of it. Thus the question of
why Don Passos' novels influenced Carlos Fuentes becomes
central to the study of their literary relationship, and
j is one of the two questions discussed here.
v i
The second question emerges as part of the answer to ;
the first. Literary influence occupies a unique place
within the literary history of the countries of the j
Western Hemisphere, the Americas; it is, in fact, one of j
several threads that together compose the entire fabric ;
I
of the literary history of the countries of Spanish I
America, from the time of the Spanish conquest, through ,
the wars of independence in the 1800s, to the j
postcolonial and neocolonial era of the twentieth
century. Because of this colonial history, a literary j
influence for twentieth-century Spanish America involves ;
I
i issues of power, national identity, and cultural :
! autonomy. The dialectic of European and North American
| l
literary influence in Spanish America has within it the
added dimension of resistance; the national literatures
of Mexico, Latin America, and South America assert their
distinct cultural voices while incorporating elements
i
from the literatures of Europe and the United States.
This is especially true of the modern Latin American
novel. Thus the literary influence of John Dos Passos on :
Carlos Fuentes reflects this resistance, and the question
of how Fuentes diverges from Dos Passos to assert the
voice of Mexico's mestizo culture is a key part of the
analysis of their literary influence.
v i i
The historical and literary context of the
| problematic of literary influence for the modern Latin
i
I American novel is discussed by Emir Rodriguez Monegal in
his short essay, "The New Latin American Novel," written
in 1979. While the purpose of his essay is to explain
why the new Latin American novel merits careful and
j extensive study, the five reasons he gives provide a
j helpful description of the position the modern European
J and Anglo-American novel occupies in Latin America.
The modern Latin America novel, first of all,
"offers a challenging mirror of a continent that has
undergone unique changes, transformations." This makes
[ the novel, according to Rodriguez Monegal, a valid source
i of insight into Latin America itself, as reliable as
"many learned treatises" (433). Juan Rulfo's Pedro
Paramo from Mexico and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Cien anos
I
de soledad from Colombia are compelling examples.
Second, the modern Latin American novel is
deeply rooted in a long tradition of
| narrative prose; a tradition which has
' its beginnings in Mayan and Incan Pre-
Columbian Myths, which continues through
the Conquest and Colonization, through
the epoch of Independence and into the
present day .... It is a tradition
which embraces the creation of a new
world and its destruction by alien
forces? a tradition of the magic, the I
unknown, the grotesque. But at the
same time a tradition which exalts the
concrete reality of the external world.
(433)
Vlll
Examples of this tradition can be found in works by
Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatemala and by Severo Sarduy
of Cuba.
Third, the modern Latin American novel "is also
| rooted in the experiments of the European and North
I
j American avant-garde," which includes the schools of
Flaubert, James, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway.
This places the Latin American novelist, as a
consequence, in the "mainstream of contemporary fiction,"
i
| but also gives the novelist the latitude to make use of
i
these "influences" freely (433). Julio Cortazar of
Argentina is a key example.
The fourth and fifth have to do with the literary
; developments found in Latin America's recent history.
J
j The first of these two is the "revolutionary literature
i
| by the major Latin American poets of 1920." A number of
I
| Latin America's new novelists are very familiar with the
i
i works of these poets, like Cdsar Vallejo of Peru, Vicente
i
I Huidobro of Chile, Jose Lezama Lima of Cuba, Pablo Neruda
I
of Chile, and Octavio Paz of Mexico. The point Rodriguez
Monegal makes here is that within modern Latin American
literature, poetry and the novel are not always distinct
genres? elements of the two easily blend together (433).
I
I In fact, it has been pointed out by Octavio Paz, the
literary historian Luis Leal, and others that the
i x
distinguishing feature of the new Latin American novel is
j the fusion of poetry into the narrative modes. The fifth
j is the link the new Latin American novel has to the "very
! important 'corpus' of essays and panoramic visions of the
| continent produced since the beginning of the century by
I
i essayists as important as Jose Enrique Rodo of Uruguay
I
j . . . and Octavio Paz of Mexico." This strain of Latin
American literary history has lead to "the mirror-like
quality" of the new Latin American novel, by providing
; the novel with the historical impetus to explore the
i
reality of modern Latin America (434).
These five points that Rodriguez Monegal emphasizes
I are essential in reaching any understanding of the new
Latin American novel, and they identify the place foreign
literary influence holds within the traditions of Latin
American literature. Of primary concern for the new
Latin American novelists is the expression of a distinct
Latin American voice. This voice is what Roberto
Fernandez Retamar of Cuba has theorized as that of
i
Caliban: the voice of the indigenous peoples of
Fernandez Retamar's "our America" that rejects the
language of the European colonizers and their
europocentric description of the continent and its
I
j people. The voice of Caliban is also what Eva-Marie
! Kroller calls "the logic of the dream," which she links
X
with postmodernism's "assaults on the concepts of
progressive history and geometrically ordered space" as
"attacks on the perceptual patterns of the European
conqueror." Caliban's language is the weapon used to
j rewrite the European text (120). Caliban's voice
i -
articulates the history, culture, and consciousness of
Spanish America. Contributing to the assertion of a
^ distinctive native voice are the native literary
t
[ traditions along with those emerging after the Spanish
I
! Conquest and up through the twentieth century. Foreign
literary influences become a part of the new Latin
American novel only inasmuch as they help serve the
culturally specific purposes of the new narrative in
Latin America. Therefore, literary influence within the
i development of the new Latin American novel cannot be
approached merely in terms of resemblances, but instead
in terms of how Latin American novelists resist
abandoning their own literary traditions that would make
(
them only mere imitators of European and Anglo-American
literary models.
While the influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
Fuentes is only a recent instance of the numerous
| literary contacts between the countries of Spanish
America and the United States that are a part of the
Western Hemisphere's literary history, it is just within
j the last two decades that the topic of inter-American j
| literary relations has been the focus of measurable j
j critical attention. Studies of specific literary j
I j
J contacts have been undertaken in the past. Walt Whitman, |
l >
Edgar Allan Poe, and William Faulkner in Latin American i
|
literature have each been studied by Fernando Alegrla,
John E. Englekirk, and James E. Irby, respectively. j
Historical accounts of literary contacts between the
United States and the countries of Latin America have
I
I been provided by Drewey Wayne Gunn, John L. Brown, and
! Luis Leal.
But critical discussions of inter-American literary
relations generally have raised the question of the
I
i extent to which the countries of North America and South
i
America share a common political and social history and,
I
i therefore, a common literary response to that history.
I
| Studies by Earl E. Fitz, Gustavo Perez Firmat, and Gari
t Laguardia and Bell Gale Chevigny have all posed the
I question with varying degrees of success. But with the
i
j emphasis on commonalities and similarities, little room
i
exists for discussions of divergences and cultural
differences. This is sadly ironic because a careful
reading of the new Latin American novel reveals much
i
cultural difference, and cultural differences is what
i this dissertation will stress in its discussion of the
XXI
literary influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes.
Indeed, differences between the culture of the United
States and the culture of Mexico are what Carlos Fuentes'
novels affirm as they reveal the influence of John Dos
Passos. He stated in Carlos Fuentes: Man of Two Worlds
that the purpose of his novels is twofold: to give voice
to the silent and to make "the Other" understood. His
message to the North Americans could be expressed this
way: "We have learned from you, but we are not you!"
1
CHAPTER I
JOHN DOS PASSOS, CARLOS FUENTES,
AND THE QUESTION OF LITERARY INFLUENCE
The literary relationship between the North American
novelist John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and the Mexican
novelist Carlos Fuentes (1928- ), between two major
figures of the twentieth-century novel, stands as one of
the richest instances of an international literary
influence and powerfully illustrates the cultural
dialectic of inter-American literary relations,
especially those between the United States and the
countries of Latin America. In his novels, Fuentes moves
beyond the realistic tradition of the novel of the
Mexican Revolution and incorporates the techniques of the
modern Anglo-American urban novel exemplified in the
major novels of John Dos Passos. What results is a
fusion of literary traditions that exploits the full
potential of the modernist novel. Fuentes constructs a
modern vision of post-Revolution Mexican culture in a
language that is both Mexican and universal in its
modernity. This "language" is an assertion of a
distinctive Mexican voice that responds to and resists
the encroachment of North American cultural hegmony in
Mexico and Latin America.1
I The literary influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
»
jFuentes surfaces not just in technical and formal
similarities between their novels, but also in those
i
i
!distinctions between Dos Passos and Fuentes which point
!out how Fuentes diverges from Dos Passos. Fuentes read
i
I
|Dos Passos7 four major novels— Manhattan Transfer and the
I
jU.S.A. trilogy— when he was fifteen, and used what he
t
jfound about the novel of the city from Dos Passos to help
jhim write his first novel, La region mas transparente
I
(1958). Up through the writing of his eleventh novel,
i
|Cristobal Nonato (1987), Fuentes has continued to make
I
fuse of the example Dos Passos provided him over 30 years
I
;ago. While Dos Passos has become a recognized figure in
I
the development of the modern novel in Latin America, it
Jis Fuentes, above all, who has acknowledged the works of
I
|John Dos Passos as an influence in the production of his
own narratives, referring in 1965 to the major works of
John Dos Passos as "mi biblia literaria" ("my literary
bible").
While Fuentes has stated more than once that Dos
Passos has been an influence on his work, Fuentes has
also pointed out the distinctions, both historical and
I
| literary, that separate their novels. Although Fuentes
I
j agrees that he and Dos Passos emerge out of a common
| literary tradition, that of the urban novel originating
in the Spanish picaresque novel, he has also pointed out
3
key differences between the urban and social experiences
he and Dos Passos were dealing with in their novels.
Fuentes has made it very clear that the situation in
America for Dos Passos is not identical to the situation
in Mexico for Fuentes. With these observations, which he
made during a 1989 telephone interview, Carlos Fuentes
asserts a cultural voice and experience in his novels
I distinct from Dos Passos'.
I Although literary influence has often meant an
Jemphasis on technical or formal similarities, whether by
l
j imitation, copying, or borrowing, Fuentes7 relationship
with Dos Passos7 novels rests not just with similarities
jbetween their novels, but in the very clear way that
;Fuentes7 novels diverge from Dos Passos7 as
jrepresentations of the Mexican urban experience and of
!
;the social and political aftermath of the Mexican
Revolution. Thus, to say that Carlos Fuentes was
influenced by John Dos Passos means that by reading
Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, Fuentes
ultimately gained a unique perspective on the
potentialities of the modern novel for the Mexican
I
writer. Fuentes brought to this perspective his
understanding of the situation of Mexico and of the
Mexican writer and intellectual in the twentieth century.
j Foreign literary influence, specifically from Europe
and the United States, has been a central question in the
4
critical response toward Fuentes' novels since the
publication of La region mas transparente. Early
analysis of his fiction repeatedly attempted to account
for this new voice in Mexican literature by identifying
i
j
those writers and works that helped shape the young j
novelist's vision and narrative technique. In response
to questions about those who have influenced him, Fuentes J
i
has acknowledged Dos Passos among a group that includes
writers from the United States, Europe, and Russia.
Scholarship, however, on the influence of John Dos
Passos on the works of Carlos Fuentes has been limited,
for the most part, to descriptions of technical features
\
, , I
similar m their works and to an acknowledgment of the |
historical debt Fuentes owes Dos Passos for certain types j
of narrative technique, those now recognized as j
characteristic of the modern novel. Yet there is
evidence to suggest that the literary connection between i
j
Dos Passos and Fuentes— novelists, literary essayists, j
and political thinkers both— is substantially more than j
one of borrowed or shared narrative technique. Central J
i
to the literary influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
Fuentes is the overt political purpose Fuentes
encountered in Dos Passos' novels. Dos Passos' criticism
of American economic and social values is significant for
Fuentes in two ways. First, it helped Fuentes develop a
critical understanding of the rise of the Mexican middle
5
class after the Revolution. Second, Dos Passos' critical
stance in part led Fuentes to express similarly a
political imperative in his novels.
Perhaps like no other writer of his generation, John
Dos Passos' life was inextricably woven into the tapestry
of American culture and history of the twentieth
century.2 John Rodrigo Dos Passos was born in Chicago to
j a wealthy Portuguese-American father, who married Dos
i
' Passos' mother, Lucy Madison, m 1910, when Dos Passos
| was fourteen years old. His education included study
j abroad and in the U.S. He graduated from Harvard in
i
| 1916. He directed much of his life-long writing career,
*
I which began in 1917, to an examination of American life
J and values in the twentieth century. He combined his
| career as a writer— as novelist, journalist, and
! essayist— with participation in the political issues of
his day, commenting on them in his novels, magazine
articles and essays, critical reviews, poetry and plays,
travel books, biographies and autobiographical accounts,
and collections of essays. In a way, his entire corpus
j serves as an examination of American democracy and
! capitalism in the twentieth century.
i
j Early on, Dos Passos became a staunch believer in his
personal brand of Jeffersonian individualism: he opposed
i unjust and unlawful limitations and restrictions on
i
I
^ individual pursuit of economic and civil rights. This
6
personal view at first propelled him into the major
political discussions of the day: American participation
in World War I, unbridled capitalistic growth, greed, the
army, political and economic oppression, restrictions on
freedoms of expression. He became one of the group of
writers and intellectuals who articulated a radical left
position in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s in
response to political and economic injustice.
A year after graduating from Harvard, Dos Passos
published his first novel, One Man's Initiation: 1917.
about a U. S. soldier serving as an ambulance driver in
France during World War I. The second novel, Three
Soldiers (1921), narrates the effects of military
training and combat on three individuals from different
social backgrounds. The first collection of poetry, A
Pushcart at the Curb, appeared in 1922, along with the
first collection of essays, Rosinante to the Road Again,
in which Dos Passos discusses Spanish culture and art.
His third novel, Streets of Nicrht (1923), treats the
attempts by a sensitive youth to resist social
convention.
Dos Passos' career as a novelist culminates in
Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A. These four novels affirm
Dos Passos' criticism of American political and social
values. Manhattan Transfer, with its narrative structure
replicating the physical and social structure of the
7
quintessential modern American city— New York— traces the j
shifting fortunes of the city's residents. The U.S.A.
trilogy (The 42nd Parallel. Nineteen Nineteen. The Big
Money1 ! . with its historical segments, film newsreels, and
newspaper items, gives narrative form to the individual j
moral and ethical situations within the political and I
social issues of America's history from the turn of the
century to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the onset ,
of The Great Depression. •
His major travel book was also written at this time, j
and it too illustrates Dos Passos' concern with social j
i
and political issues. In All Countries (1934) deals with !
the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Russia and the Communist
Revolution, the agrarian legacy of the Mexican *
revolutionary fighter Emiliano Zapata. Dos Passos' later [
fiction includes Adventures of a Young Man (1939), whose
main character is betrayed by the Communist Party for not i
following party line. This novel is the first of a j
second trilogy, District of Columbia (1952). Dos Passos' >
j
later nonfiction includes The Ground We Stand On (1941), !
a collection of biographies of men who framed American
democracy and liberty, and The Theme Is Freedom (1956), a
collection of essays which reflect Dos Passos'
conservative political values.
After 1939, Dos Passos had become disenchanted with :
the political left, with its insistence on political j
ideology at the expense of aesthetic merit and its own
forms of repression, and began to be critical of what he
saw as extreme positions there that were as restrictive
! as those views he initially fought against. He remained
a spokesperson for the political right up to the time of
I
j his death in 1970.
i
; Carlos Fuentes, in the forefront of what has been
called the "Boom" in Latin American literature, writes
from a tradition of literary production that demands of
the writer, in the words of the Peruvian novelist Mario
Vargas Llosa, "a social and political commitment." This
means, according to Vargas Llosa, that
in Peru, in Bolivia, in Nicaragua et cetera
. . . to be a writer means . . . to assume
a social responsibility: at the same time
that you develop a personal literary work,
you should serve, through your writing but
also through your actions, as an active
participant in the solution of the economic,
political and cultural problems of your
society. ("Social" 6)
For Carlos Fuentes, as a Mexican novelist working out of
this literary tradition, writing and social
responsibility are one and the same.
Indeed, Fuentes' work as a writer, intellectual,
political activist, and ambassador must all be seen as
mutually reinforcing pursuits of a single career.3
Throughout his career as a novelist, Fuentes has also
been participating in the intellectual and political
development of Mexico in the twentieth century. As his
9
father was a member of Mexico's diplomatic corps, Fuentes
spent his early life living in different major cities and
national capitals— Panama City, where he was born, Quito,
Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and between 1934 and 1940,
Washington, D.C., with additional stays in Chile,
Argentina, and Switzerland. Fuentes' passion for books
and literature surfaced early, and even before he
attended high school in Mexico City had already begun to
publish "fantastical short stories in the literary
magazine of the Grange School in Chile" (Faris, Carlos
1
2)- i
The family returned to Mexico in 1944. Fuentes would j
I
later acknowledge the significance to the writing of La
reaidn mas transparente of seeing Mexico City for the
first time upon the family's return. After graduating I
from high school in 1946, Fuentes completed his education ;
I
and preparation for diplomatic service and began his j
i
career as writer and intellectual. He studied law at the j
j
National University (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
I
Mexico) and at the Institute for International Studies in
i
Geneva. Upon his return to Mexico, Fuentes held several
I
i
positions at the National University and served at the |
Ministry of Foreign Affairs as head of the Department of
Cultural Relations.
His early literary activity is marked by the j
appearance of Revista Mexicana de Literatura, a literary _j
magazine he cofounded with Emmanuel Carballo, and, in
1954, the publication of his first book, Los dias
enmascarados (The Masked Days’ ), a collection of short
stories. His political and cultural writings, reflecting
his "developing critique of Latin American problems from
a socialist viewpoint" (Faris, Carlos 3), also started to
appear at this time in several left-wing newspapers, such
as Politica and Siempre. Fuentes' critical commentary,
whether on literature or politics, has been as compelling
and enlightening as his novels and plays in its analysis
of modern Mexico and modern Latin America. Fuentes'
major critical works include Tiempo Mexicano (1971), a
collection of essays on Mexican politics, and an essay in
Whither Latin America? (1963), in which Fuentes addresses
North America and argues for political and cultual
autonomy for Latin Americans. His major contributions to
literary analysis include La nueva novela
hispanoamericana (1969), Casa con dos puertas (1970), and
Myself With Others (1988). The first of these describes
the new "language" of the modern Latin American novel;
the second discusses the three major stages of the
tradition of the novel as exemplified in the novels of
Jane Austin, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. The
third contains the essay "Cervantes, or The Critique of
Reading," in which Fuentes locates in Don Quixote the
beginning of the modern world.______ ____ _____
But it is through his fiction that Fuentes has
established his international reputation, and in each
work Fuentes deals with the issue of modern Mexico coming
to terms with its ancient, Spanish-European, and
| recent— revolutionary— past. The Good Conscience. about
l
| a young man confronting the limitations of cultural and
i family traditions, appeared in 1959, and this was
I
I followed, in 1962, by Aura and the masterwork The Death
I
j of Artemio Cruz. in which Fuentes narrates the betrayal
of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution through the
memories of the dying revolutionary general Artemio
Cruz.4 A number of other novels have followed, including
| A Change of Skin (1967), Terra Nostra (1975), Hydra Head
: (1978), and Distant Relations (1980). With the novel
l
Cristobal Nonato (1989), Fuentes returns to the subject
i
j of modern Mexico City; the events in the novel take place
j during the year of the guincentenial of Christopher
I
i Columbus' arrival to the New World— 1992.
! Carlos Fuentes has also written plays, The One-Eyed
I
1 Man is King and All Cats Are Gray, both published in
!
1970, and has worked on a number of film projects,
including the film Mexico. Mexico with Francois
Reichenbach. Fuentes served as the Mexican ambassador to
France from 1975 to 1977, during the presidency of Luis
j Echeverria, but resigned with the election of Diaz Ordaz,
i
[whose right-wing policy Fuentes held responsible for the
12
Tlatelolco massacre of 1968.5 This painful moment in
Mexican history along with similar examples of political
oppression in Paris and Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s
confirmed Fuentes' objections to centralized power and
his continued advocacy of socialist reforms. He remains
an eloquent and compelling spokesperson for progressive
political reform and cultural autonomy for Mexico and all
of Latin America.
As the facts of their lives and literary careers
suggest, literature and political activism are
inseparably intertwined: John Dos Passos and Carlos
Fuentes both assert through their novels a distinctive
understanding of literature within its political and
historical context.
Thus, a political ideology that defines the role of
the writer as social critic, identifies the purpose for
writing, and indicates the content of the writing
similarly dominates the work of these two novelists. As
a consequence of this politico-aesthetic context defining
their work, the literary influence of Dos Passos on
Carlos Fuentes emerges as significantly more than just
literary historical continuity or a mere borrowing of
narrative technique— the two explanations for the
influence that previous scholarship on their literary
relationship has stressed.
Apart from the striking similarity in the ideological
basis for their novels that has yet to be examined,
support for an amended view of their literary
relationship comes from Fuentes himself. In a 1985
interview with Jason Weiss, Fuentes was asked about North j
*
American writers being influenced by Latin American
writers. In his response, Fuentes described literary
interrelations and literary "influence" (a term he, in
fact, prefers not to use) this way:
Well, I hate the word "influences" but I
think that we all form part of a
tradition, and if you mean that we
recognize more and more, north and south
in the Americas, that we belong to a
tradition and that there are many common
points in that tradition, that right
.... But the fact is that without the
previous poetic experience of Gongora,
probably the North American and the I
Southern writer Faulkner could not have
written his novels. And without the
novels of Faulkner, many of us would not
have written our novels. It is in this
sense that the health of literature is
the openness of its tradition, the
openness of its several streams. Who is
not influenced, of course! Books are
the products of other books, certainly.
(115).
Fuentes seems to be saying that books are made possible
because of the existence of other books, that in some way
books give rise to others of their own kind. In effect,
Fuentes equates tradition with influence, and is ;
j
identifying a dialectic of intertextuality. j
14
This view of literary influence is further elaborated
i
on in two other observations that Fuentes makes. In his I
autobiographical essay "How I Started to Write," Fuentes
acknowledges the lesson about literature that he learned
from the Mexican novelist Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959):6
"there is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an
inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a
f
variation on the past" (19). Fuentes stresses here that
the dialectic of intertextuality at the core of literary
tradition/influence arises out of the "re-writing" that
is done in making a given tradition "new."
In his 1989 telephone interview, Fuentes applies this
dialectic to the influence of Dos Passos. Fuentes
identifies a common origin for both himself and Dos
Passos, and that is the "tradition of the urban novel."
But he also stipulates a conceptual difference between
his urban novels and Dos Passos'; this difference rests
on major cultural and historical distinctions between
Fuentes' Mexico and Dos Passos' United States, as these
become evident in the two nations' urban cultures. Thus
Fuentes not only "re-writes" Dos Passos' Manhattan
Transfer and U.S.A. in writing the novels La region mds
transparente to Critobal Nonato. but also affirms within
those novels major cultural and historical differences.
15
Fuentes' comments on literary influence in general
and on the influence of Dos Passos specifically call for
an altogether new set of questions in a discussion of the
influence of Dos Passos on Fuentes. The question of Dos
Passos' appeal for Fuentes is one, and is an issue for
the study of literary influence generally. Another,
specific to the influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
Fuentes, is the question of how Fuentes' novels
distinguish themselves from Dos Passos' as the
consequence of the postcolonial dialectic of
inter-American literary influence. Part of the answer
for Dos Passos' appeal is the socio-political stance
Fuentes found in Dos Passos' novels. Dos Passos'
narrativization of history and his structural framework
for depicting an urban landscape are parts of the
tradition of the urban novel Fuentes encountered in Dos
Passos that Fuentes "re-wrote" in his novels about modern
Mexico City.
Evidence for this view of their literary relationship
can be found in Fuentes' novels, his political and
literary essays, and in additional interviews Fuentes has
given. An analysis of this evidence will provide a more
complete understanding of the influence Dos Passos has
had on Carlos Fuentes. It will also clarify the
definition of an international literary influence, and
16
outline more precisely the dialectic of literary
influence within inter-Amrican literary relations. Such
a discussion will fill a noticeable gap in research on
North American/Latin American literary interrelations in
general and on the influence of Dos Passos on Fuentes in
particular. And, more importantly perhaps, such a study
will reverse the usual paradigm of influence studies.
This has been to position the works by one writer as a
key to understanding the works by the influenced writer
and not to position both writers as equal sources of
insight for each other. In other words, by saying that
Carlos Fuentes borrowed from or was influenced by the
major novels of John Dos Passos is to make John Dos
Passos' novels the frame of reference for studying the
works of Carlos Fuentes. The works of the Mexican
novelist, in other words, are understood in terms of the
North American's. But Fuentes' reading of Dos Passos'
novels, in addition to his own works and critical
commentary, can become a frame of reference for
understanding Dos Passos' political thought as well as
the innovativeness of his narrative forms and the
compelling attraction both have held for Carlos Fuentes
and Latin American writers in general.
Fuentes first indicated the influence of Dos Passos
on his work soon after the publication of La reaibn mas
17
transparente. and since then, Fuentes has been asked on
numerous occasions to comment on those writers who have
influenced his work. While the way in which Fuentes
describes these literary influences varies, one element
remains constant: John Dos Passos. Of the influence of
Dos Passos, Fuentes stated this in an early interview:
"Dos Passos, lo admito de una manera mecanica, cuando no
puramente tipografica" (qtd in Campos 11; "Dos Passos, I
admit it [the influence] in a mechanical way, when not
purely typographical"). In a later interview, published
in 1967, Fuentes admits borrowing from Dos Passos the
techniques of flashbacks and seeing eyes (Harss and
Dohmann 293).
In a third interview, conducted by Emmanuel Carballo
and published in 1965, Fuentes details more fully his
relationship with Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer and the
U.S.A. trilogy, and the writing of La region mas
transparente:
Carballo— Sigamos con La region m&s
transparente.
Fuentes— Es una novela que tiene un
proposito concreto: introducir
en las letras mexicanas tecnicas
que antes no se habxan empleado.
Tecnicas que son validas
universalraente y que, al mismo
tiempo, son capaces de expresar
la realidad mexicana. Avierto
en ella varias influencias,
algunas mal digeridas.
18
Carballo—
Fuentes—
Carballo—
Fuentes—
+ +
Carballo—
Fuentes—
Carballo—
Fuentes—
?Cuales son estas tecnicas ,
novedosas? ;
Fundamentalmente son las de
Faulkner, Dos Passos, Lawrence
y Huxley: las cuatro grandes
influencias que admit!
conscientemente en la creacion
de esta novela ....
Viene, luego, Dos Passos.
Es esta la influencia fundamental
y, al mismo tiempo, la mas obvia. i
La lectura de Manhattan Transfer
me apaciono a los quince anos.
La trilogia USA obtuvo, tambien,
mi aprobacion irrestricta. Dos
Passos fue mi biblia literaria.
Al escribir una novela sobre
nuestra gran ciudad, me influyo
naturalmente la tecnica del
novelista norteamericano. (434).
I
+ + + + + + + + I
i
i
Let's continue with Where the Air j
Is Clear. ,
i
I
This is a novel that has a j
concrete purpose: to introduce I
into Mexican writing techniques |
that had not been used before. j
Techniques that are valid
universally and that, at the
same time, are capable of
expressing the realities of
Mexican life. I reveal in it !
rWhere the Air Is Clear1 various j
influences, some poorly digested. |
I
Which are these innovative i
techniques? j
f
Fundamentally they are those of j
Faulkner, Dos Passos, Lawrence
and Huxley: the four major I
influences that I consciously j
included in the writing of |
this novel .... I
19
Carballo— Dos Passos comes next.
Fuentes— This is the fundamental
influence and, at the same
time, the most obvious. The
reading of Manhattan Transfer
inspired a passion in me when
I was fifteen years old. The
U.S.A. trilogy obtained, as well,
my overwhelming approbation. Dos
Passos became my literary bible.
In writing a novel about our great
city, I was influenced naturally
by the techniques of the North
American novelist.
Fuentes reveals here a number of key elements about
his use of Dos Passos' work at the time that he was
writing La region mas transparente. Fuentes' comments to
Carballo indicate that he found in Dos Passos novelistic
techniques that suited his conscious purpose in the
writing of his first novel— to introduce to the Mexican
novel techniques that had not been used before and to
express in the novel the reality of modern Mexico.
Through Dos Passos, Fuentes also came upon a strategy for
writing about Mexico City. Fuentes became enthralled
with Manhattan Transfer when he was fifteen years old,
and the U.S.A. trilogy earned Fuentes' overwhelming
approbation. Dos Passos became Fuentes literary bible!
These observations are briefly expanded upon in a
later interview, one given in 1986, in which Fuentes
describes more specifically another component that he
found in Dos Passos' work:
20
I was a reader of Dos Passos and of
Faulkner at the same time, so I knew
that there was a difference between
Dos Passos, who was recording time,
and Faulkner, who was creating time,
and I tried to get both things into
my first novel, Where the Air is Clear
[sic]. (140)
In these interviews, Fuentes speaks provocatively of his
relationship with Dos Passos' works and how they
contributed to the writing of Fuentes' own novels. His
comments have led to nunerous attempts to clarify what
Fuentes means and to place his connection to Dos Passos
into some historical context.
With few exceptions, research on the influence of Dos
Passos on Carlos Fuentes has been limited to and has
relied heavily on Fuentes' own explicit admission, in
these interviews, concerning his relationship with the
major works of John Dos Passos. This research, in
stressing that Dos Passos exerted a very clear influence
on Fuentes' writing, emphasizes that Fuentes is
historically indebted to Dos Passos for specific
narrative techniques, in that Fuentes borrowed from Dos
Passos' novels discreet narrative strategies. While not
considering how Fuentes diverges from Dos Passos, this
research has identified Fuentes' borrowings in five
distinct ways.
Carlos Monsivdis, the Mexican literary critic, voices
the historical connection between their works: "Carlos
Fuentes viene en linea directa de Dos Passos, Aldous
Huxley, D. H. Lawrence y Octavio Paz" (qtd in Reeve,
"Annotated” 645; "Carlos Fuentes comes directly out of
the line of Dos Passos . . .). Monsivais is joined by
Mario Vargas Llosa, who, in tracing the history of the
novel in Latin America, assigns Fuentes' first novel a
place in that complex history by showing an historical
link between Fuentes and Dos Passos:
The first novel of Carlos Fuentes, La
region mas transparente (1958), is a mural
painting, pullulating and populus, of
Mexico City, an attempt to capture in
fictional form all the strata of that
pyramid, from the indigenous base up to
the oligarchical summit. In order to
plot the biography of a city, Fuentes
makes use of the entire arsenal of
techniques of the modern novel, from
Dos Passos' "simultaneous" narratives to
the interior monologue of Joyce and the
prose poem. ("Primitives" 10)
More recently, the historial thread connecting the work
of Carlos Fuentes with that of John Dos Passos has been
acknowledged. Gari Laguardia and Bell Gale Chevigny, in
the introduction to their 1986 collection of comparative
studies on the literature of the United States and
Spanish America, describe the historial line between Dos
Passos and Fuentes within the context of the Latin
American literary "Boom":
Many writers identified with the "Boom"—
Cort^zar, Vargas Llosa, Garcia M&rquez,
and Fuentes— are indebted to U.S. writers
of the past— Poe, Faulkner, Hemingway,
22
Dos Passos— for treatment of self-conscious
American themes as well as for their formal
resources. (29)
A second way in which the influence is discussed is
in the identification of cinematic techniques found in
the novels of both Dos Passos and Fuentes. A. Zamora
I
Vicente points out that "La reaidn mas transparente es j
una novela fundamentalmente cinematogrdfica. . . . la |
i
novela estd condicionada, en su voz y en sus andaduras, j
»
por el cine" (535; "Where the Air Is Clear is a novel !
(
fundamentally cinemagrafic. . . . the novel is j
conditioned, in its tone and in its gestures, by film."). !
Zamora Vicente points to the Camera Eye in John Dos
\
Passos' USA as the antecedent for these cinemagrafic j
i
t
techniques. Gloria Duran states that "Fuentes' J
(
fascination with film" accounts for several narrative j
devices in his works that can best be described as S
I
cinematic. Duran cites "holds" and "freezes" among these
i
devices and then states that "none of these devices is j
totally new in Fuentes. Where the Air Is Clear also made I
|
use of 'newsreel,' 'Camera Eye' and other such borrowings
from Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer" (159).
The influence of John Dos Passos on Fuentes' writing
is also discussed in terms of specific narrative
strategies, apart from those attributable to cinema and
film production. In his 1967 dissertation on the
23
narrative technique of Carlos Fuentes, Richard Reeve
comments briefly on the role Manhattan Transfer,
specifically, played in the writing of La region mas
transparente. Fuentes found inspiration for devoting a
novel to Mexico City in Dos Passos' multiple view
technique (10). Reeve also quotes from Fuentes'
interview with Carballo to stress the debt Fuentes owes
Dos Passos for literary technique (49).
Fidel Ortega Martinez sees the influence of John Dos
Passos on Carlos Fuentes showing itself in various
aspects, but fundamentally in the structure and style of
La region mas transparente (27). Walter Langford in his
study The Mexican Novel Comes of Age paraphrases Fuentes'
responses to Carballo's questions about those novelists
who had influenced him in the writing of La region m£s
transparente. Langford cites passages from other
i
! interviews to present Fuentes' use of different time
elements— those suggested by Dos Passos, Faulkner, and
Lawrence— in his first novel (134).
i
A. Zamora Vicente lists the innovative narrative
components from Dos Passos that can be found in La region
j mds transparente. Zamora Vicente lists specifically:
la tecnica de pianos superpuestos o
coetaneos, la introduccidn de noticias
del momento, el recuerdo de los
personajes ilustres de hechos famosos por
variadisimas razones en la conciencia
colectiva, recurso que Fuentes utiliza
24
tambien. No serf a nada complicado
encontrar un correlato entre los citados
en la trilogia USA y los citados in La
region mas transparente (politicos,
guerreros, gobernantes, artistas de cine,
huelguistas famosos, etc.)* (534) 1
+ + + + + + + + + i
the techniques of superimposed or co- |
temporaneous frames, the introduction of j
current news items, the memory for various |
reasons in the collective consciousness of j
illustrious individuals or famous events. i
It would not be difficult to find a [
correlation between those mentioned in the j
U.S.A. trilogy and those mentioned in !
Where the Air Is Clear (political figures, [
guerrillas, government officials, film j
stars, and well-known strikers, etc.
Zamora Vicente does not overestimate the influence of Dos
Passos on Fuentes in stating that "quiza la presencia mas
i
viva en La region mas transparente sea la de John Dos ,
i
Passos" (534; "Perhaps the presence most vital in Where :
the Air Is Clear is that of John Dos Passos"). j
i
Emir Rodriguez Monegal attributes the extent of Dos '
i
Passos' influence to narrative technique. He states that 1
the |
impact of his [Dos Passos'] fictional world
was confined to his skillful
presentation of North American reality !
through the use of a sophisticated narrative I
as in Manhattan Transfer . . .or through [
such reporting techniques as the "Newsreel"
and the "Camera Eye" of the USA trilogy.
("Game" 271)
Rodriguez Monegal sums up the influence of Dos Passos on
a young generation of Latin American writers, that
25
includes Carlos Fuentes, when he says, "To some of our
young writers, Dos Passos offered a ready-made formula to
cope, both at a political and creative level, with the
problem of a narrative presentation of contemporary Latin
American reality" ("Game" 271).
And, finally, Wendy Faris emphasizes a resemblance
between Dos Passos and Fuentes when she notes the
borrowing from Dos Passos found in Where the Air Is
Clear. In describing the structure of the novel, she
points out a resemblance to novels by John Dos Passos:
"The fragmentation of the text into separate sections,
often headed by a character's name, resembles closely the
structure of Dos Passos' USA trilogy" (Carlos 38).
The fourth and fifth ways— purpose in writing the
novel and characterization— in which the relationship
between Dos Passos and Fuentes is described, specifically
between Where the Air Is Clear and Manhattan Transfer, is
taken up by a number of researchers. Richard Reeve, for
one, again relying on Fuentes' interview with Emmanuel
Carballo, states that "lo que Fuentes intente en su
primera novela es una vasta vision panor&mica de la
cuidad de Mexico. El modelo seria Manhattan Transfer que
Fuentes leyo por primera vez en 1943 ("Carlos" 296;
"Making" 36; "What Fuentes intends in his first novel is
a vast panoramic vision of Mexico City. The model would
26
be Manhattan Transferf which Fuentes read for the first
time in 1943"). Another, Steven Boldy, describes Where
the Air Is Clear as a novel with a "vast number of
characters painted on a wide and open Dos Passos-like
canvas" (160).
In addition to these studies of Fuentes' first novel
that refer briefly to what scholars have identified as
the influence of Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes, a number
of comparative studies discuss similarities between Dos
Passos and Fuentes. Seymour Menton, for example,
includes Fuentes' La region mas transparente and Dos
Passos' Manhattan Transfer in his study of what he calls
"la obertura nacional," the introductory prose poem
prefacing the novels of several twentieth-century
writers. Barbara Lee Hussey, in her dissertation on the
modern novel of the city, compares works by Fuentes and
Dos Passos. She devotes one chapter of her dissertation
to "two novels which approximate the metropolis through
the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives— John Dos
Passos' Manhattan Transfer and Carlos Fuentes' La region
mas transparente" (3566-A). And she traces within this
chapter thematic and technical similarities between the
two novels.
All of these studies indicate that researchers have
recognized an unmistakable connection between
27
twentieth-century writers from North America and those
from Latin America, and, in particular, between the works
of John Dos Passos and Carlos Fuentes. However, as these
numerous studies also suggest, a complete and thorough
analysis of the literary relationship between these two
twentieth-century writers, that stresses similar
ideological imperatives and Fuentes' assertion of a
distinctive Mexican voice, has not been attempted.
Commentary on their literary relationship is to be found
only within larger studies. Thus, with few exceptions,
the previous research, while establishing key connections
between the literary traditions represented by North
American and Latin American novel writing, has done
little else but to paraphrase Fuentes' account of what he
found in Dos Passos' novels and what he borrowed from ■
them, and to point out technical and thematic
similarities between Where the Air Is Clear and Manhattan
Transfer.
Specifically, much of this previous research has
neglected to raise two essential questions in addition to
the question of what is a literary influence: What made
Dos Passos so appealing to the future Mexican novelist,
and how does Fuentes diverge from Dos Passos to maintain
a distinct Mexican voice? The first of these three
i
questions leads to the consideration of literary
influence within comparative literary methodology; the
second leads to the consideration of the similar
ideological imperatives that Dos Passos and Fuentes each
respond to in the writing of their novels, those stemming
i
from the socio-political and cultural contexts that gave ;
rise to the work of both novelists and that led to a j
i
similar attention to history in their narratives. The j
i
third leads to the issue of cultural hegemony within j
inter-American literary relations. j
I
Comparatists define a literary influence as an effect j
on the works of a writer from a source outside of that !
writer's own national literary tradition or historical
period. Literary influence encompasses a range of
situations; and, although not unproblematic, literary ,
influence remains a valid subject for critical study j
within comparative literary methodology.7 j
Literary influence is one category of literary j
relationship out of the several types that comparative j
literary study has traditionally identified as its domain j
or object of study. According to Francois Jost, ;
"influences and analogies" constitute one of four "basic
i
fields" of "comparatist inquiry." The other three are
"movements and trends; genres and forms; and motifs,
types, and themes" (33). Jost further divides influences
and analogies to include: !
29
source (the inspiration or information
supplied or nourished by foreign authors
or books), fortune (the response or the
success or the impact that the literature
attains in the literature of another), and
image or mirage (the true or false idea
that one nation has of the literature of
another). (34)
Jost provides as well the most all-encompassing
i
definition of a literary influence: "the interactions
between two or more national literatures, works,
or authors, or upon the particular function of certain
personalities in the transmission of various literary
doctrines or techniques" (33).
But for the influence of one particular writer upon
another, a variety of statements defining that relationship i
are to be found. J. T. Shaw expresses his definition this !
way:
An author may be considered to have been
influenced by a foreign author when
something from without can be demonstrated
to have produced upon him and/or his
artistic works an effect his native
literary tradition and personal development
do not explain. (91)
To distinguish literary influence from other types of
literary relationships, Shaw states that
influence is not confined to individual
details or images or borrowings or
sources— though it may include them—
but is something pervasive, something
organically involved in and presented
through artistic works. (91)
30
Henry Peyre, writing in 1952, defines literary influence
as a
stimulant which has the advantage of
exoticism, hence of enhanced magic, and
often an authorization for a young writer
to accomplish what he was too timid to
achieve by himself against a cramping
environment or a dulled national
tradition. (8)
Haskell Block sees literary influence as "an essential
part of the way literature comes about" (34) and defines
it as "operative forces which shape and direct subsequent
artistic activity" (34).
For A. Owen Aldridge, the indication of a literary
influence is "resemblances" between two authors
manifested in many ways (144). His definition is that
"influence represents a direct effect upon one literary
work caused by a preceding one" (143). He further
defines an influence "as something which exists in the
work of one author which could not have existed had he
not read the work of a previous author" (144). Ulrich
Weisstein defines influence as a "kind of assimilation"
(Comparative 31). For a literary influence to be
meaningful, it "must be manifested in an intrinsic form,
upon or within the literary works themselves. It may be
shown in content, thought, ideas, the general
j WELTANSCHAUUNG presented by particular works" (Shaw 92).
And Claudio Guillen can be said to summarize what the
31
concept of literary influence represents for comparatists
i
when he says that "an influence [is] a recognizable and ,
!
significant part of the genesis of a literary work of i
art" (30). For Guillen, a literary influence as such |
exists when it makes the deviant not the norm possible
I
(Aldridge et. al., 151). j
The essential component of a literary influence is {
the effect: the absorption of the influencing work(s) by J
the influenced writer and the assimilation of material \
I
into the influenced writer's own composing and creative [
i
I
repertoire. Henry Peyre considers this facet of literary j
influence when he states that "an influence in literature j
i
drives the influenced one to be more truly himself j
( •
j through maturing more quickly" (8). Anna Balakian j
1 !
j describes the resulting phenomena of literay influence i
this way: ". . . [influence] jars the writer from his \
\
ordinary path and reveals to him new vistas" (25). J. T. j
Shaw also touches upon this component of literary
!
influence when he states that "influence shows the
influenced author producing work which is essentially his
own" (91).
I
In addition to providing a definition of a literary j
influence, comparatists have also attempted to provide >
careful descriptions of the goals and procedures for the
study of literary influence. Within comparative literary ,
32
inquiry, influence studies, also called literary
indebtedness (Shaw), relation studies (Jost 40), source
studies (Tritt), and contact studies (Chambers 145), in
general seek as their goal the illumination of
interactions and resemblances between two
or more national literatures, works, or
authors or . . . the particular function
I
of certain personalities in the !
transmission of various literary doctrines
or techniques. (Jost 33) j
Studying the influence of one author on another "helps j
explain why a writer expresses a thought or a sentiment |
in the way he does." Influence studies reveal "something |
which exists in the work of one author which could not
have existed had he not read the work of a previous
author" (Aldridge et. al., 144). J
Part of what influence studies attempt to do is to !
I
account for the reception of a literature or of an j
author's work by another literature or individual author. 1
I
In the case of the influence of one author on another, I
9 I
influence studies explain why the work of one author i
!
resulted in the effect it has on another, whether that |
effect is a borrowing or, as Fuentes has stated about the
j influence of Dos Passos, a product. Understanding the
! meaning of Fuentes' claims about his literary ■
relationship with the major works of Dos Passos requires
that what made Fuentes receptive to Dos Passos' works be
analyzed. Influence studies are valuable only when they
raise questions such as "what was retained and what was
rejected, and why. and how was the material absorbed and
integrated, and with what success?" (Remak 2). According
to J. T. Shaw, "the seed of literary influence must fall
on fallow land. The author . . . must be ready to
accept, transmute, react to the influence" (91). In the
words of Henry H. H. Remak, successful influence studies
do "contribute to . . . knowledge of literary history
. to . . . [an] understanding of the creative
process and of the literary work of art" (2).
A literary influence, then, becomes manifest as the
result of a dialectical process that makes the consequent
literary production more than either an imitation or a
mere borrowing, even though imitations and borrowings can
be initial evidence of a literary influence.® The
dialectical process begins, clearly enough, with the
contact: one writer reads the works of another from a
different literary tradition or historical period. The
process then continues through what can be referred to as
the absorption: the foreign literary works become
integrated within the influenced writer's creative force.
Finally, there is the product— literary production— which
34
reveals the influence. This description of literary !
J influence combines the two definitions given by Aldridge 1
I !
and Weisstein, and will be the definition of literary !
i
influence for this study.
While the contact, as well as the imitations and
borrowings, can be documented relatively easily, the
! absorption becomes the most challenging to prove, as it ;
(
strikes at the very heart of what is traditionally called j
the creative process and the transforming capacity of the
I
literary imagination. The dialectic stems from one ,
!
writer being affected by and acting upon the works of
another by the absorption mechanism. The second of these :
two movements is central to literary influence and is
; what distinguishes it from borrowing and imitation.
1
I
I In a borrowing or imitation a writer takes material
i
directly from another— whether formal, stylistic, or
thematic— without any kind of transformation or
transmutation. The result would be a mere copy, a
similarity without creative vitality or originality.
With the dialectical nature of a literary influence,
i
however, the result is not a copy; instead, there is a 1
fusion of two literary traditions into one, and that
i fusion is manifested in the literary output of one
I
( particular writer. A kind of splicing occurs which
I brings together two literary traditions and which shows
I
» i
35
the foreign literature having been both absorbed and
transformed by the other writer. The resulting literary
production exhibits the presence of two literary
traditions in one, in much the same way as a child will
show physical features of each of its parents. Each
parent can be "seen" in the child; the child bears
features from each of the two parents. Yet the child is
not an exact duplicate of only one parent, and, most
importantly, the existence of the child could not be
possible without the unique genetic material provided by
each parent at the moment of the child's conception.
Carlos Fuentes' literary production resembles just
such a "union," but of two national literary traditions.
Fuentes' novels are the "child"; its "parents" are the
tradition of literary realism that culminated in the
novel of the Mexican Revolution and the tradition of the
American urban novel of social commentary. As the fusion
of these two traditions, Fuentes' novels take the
tradition of the Mexican novel into the forefront of the
twentieth century. And the ideological stance in Dos
Passos' novels remains the compelling force in their
lingering effect on Fuentes' writing. Fuentes' own
desire to give narrative form to a post-Revolutionary
Mexico City in his first novel that would lead to a
critical understanding of modern Mexican culture drew
36
Fuentes to see, as he has stated, Dos Passos7 novels as
solutions to an artistic predicament and as a means of
crystallizing his own concerns about Mexico in the
twentieth century that he encountered during the early
part of his career as a novelist. Dos Passos, thus,
contributed not only to the development of Fuentes7 own
narrative voice, but also to the formation of Fuentes7
critical perspective that shaped his understanding of
modern Mexican society and of himself as a novelist in
the tradition of the Latin American writer. As Fuentes
continued to write after La region mis transparente,
Dos Passos remained an insparable part of Fuentes7
literary output.
Evidence for this powerful influence that Dos Passos7
novels have exerted on Fuentes comes from the analogous
ideological work in their novels, their other critical
writings, and numerous interviews. While much of the
ideological content of their novels is explicitly
political and similar in their perspectives, richer
evidence lies in the similarities between the contexts
both writers emerged from and the similar understanding
each writer had of his function as a novelist and of the
role the novels were to occupy within the separate
cultural contexts each writer represents. These
analogous ideological components of their literary
37
production are what comparatists refer to as the rapport
de fait— the harmony in deed that connects all valid
literary influence.
While the term ideology was first used in 1797, it
has only recently become a powerful critical term in both
cultural and literary analyses, that assigns to literary
production the role of articulating not universality, but
synchronic beliefs and values. Before, ideology was used
primarily in the social sciences to identify the belief
system of a society. Writing in the International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), Edward Shils
defines ideology as:
one varieant form of those comprehensive
patterns of cognitive and moral beliefs
about man [sic], society, and the universe
in relation to man [sic] and society, which
flourish in human societies. Outlooks and
creeds, systems and movements of thought,
and programs are among the other types of
comprehensive patterns which are to be
distinguished from ideology.
As a term used by the social scientist to distinguish a
particular pattern of thought, ideology was limited in
its appliction to systems of political beliefs.
Shils points out that specific ideologies are the
products "of man's [sic] need for imposing intellectual
order on the world" and "arise in conditions of crisis
and in sectors of society to whom the hitherto prevailing
outlook has become unacceptable." Ideology's
38
relationship to truth and its perception as a "false
consciousness" arose, according to Shils, in "the
tradition of European thought that culminated in Marxism
and in the sociology of knowledge developed by Mannheim."
Within this view, ideology is "untruthful" as it is an
articulation of a false "universalization." In its more
current use in literary study, ideology identifies the
cultural processes— modes of representation— through |
I
which a society perceives and understands itself and its J
relation to reality. Ideology has also come to mean the J
content of those modes of representation, what a society ,
j
believes is true and natural. j
I
The underlying matrix for culture, ideology assigns j
!
j value as xt establishes the hierarchy for all the j
J material elements of a culture. As such, ideology is the j
grid of assumptions and perceptions upon which all j
j
cultural components, be they aesthetic, social, economic, >
political, religious, scientific, are generated, J
identified, evaluated, related to one another, abandoned, I
rejected, regenerated, reinforced, and perpetuated. |
Ideology makes for the possibility of culture— structured j
human societies— to the extent that without ideology— |
i
i
without a method of valuation— there can be no culture. ;
l
And the existence of any culture automatically >
l
presupposes the existence of an ideology— a J
i
value-assigning set of assumptions and perceptions— to
sustain it.
| The effect of ideology on the individual subject is
| that of organizing the raw data of existence so that
j
i consciousness is an understanding of existence in terms
i
f
’ of the components of a culture, their hierarchical
I
I arrangement, and their interaction. For the individual
i
! subject, ideology is the "received framework of meaning
I
1 and belief" by which the subject can "read" experience
[ (Gates 4). As the framework of consciousness, ideology
j provides the individual subject with a "vocabulary" and a
I
j "grammar" by which to "read" and comprehend experience.
I
1
| Ideology also assigns the individual a position within
| the cultural hierarchy. This is a consequence of the
i
! normalizing effect of ideology. Indeed, the capacity of
j ideology to normalize, codify, and reify "is sometimes
I
[ seen as the primary or defining characteristic of
I
I ideology" (Pratt 140).
The definition of ideology as primarily a determiner
of value differs significantly from other definitions and
descriptions of ideology currently used in cultural and
literary studies.9 Yet such a difference is demanded by
the cultural and ideological imperatives evidenced by the
, novelists Dos Passos and Fuentes, if an explanation for
! and a complete description of the literary influence of
40
John Dos Passes on Carlos Fuentes are to be successful.
Each of these two novelists are points at which converge
several key elements of their respective cultures; among
them are novel writing and political activism. In their
respective cultures, these components are assigned
different values; these values, in turn, affected the way
Fuentes read the novels of Dos Passos and made use of
them in the writing of his own narratives.
Traditionally, since the first use of the term by
Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1797 to mean the science of
ideas (McLellan 5), ideology has had a number of
meanings.10 Writing in 1977, Raymond Williams lists the
three most used definitions of the term:
(i) a system of beliefs characteristic
of a particular class or group;
(ii) a system of illusory beliefs— false
ideas or false consciousness— which
can be contrasted with true or
scientific knowledge;
(iii) the general process of the production
of meanings and ideas. (55)
In all three definitions given by Williams, one issue
remains constant— the dialectic between thought and
materiality, between perception and understanding on the
one hand and a concrete transcendent reality on the
other. This dialectic, along with Williams' third
definition, are dominant in the meaning ideology now has
within literary study, with a culture's forms of
41
I
i
discourse— modes of representation— the source of a j
culture's articulation of its ideology. 1
I
James H. Kavanagh provides a general definition of ;
J
ideology within present day literary studies: I
Ideology is a social process that works
on and through every social subject, that, ;
like any other social process, everyone is j
"in,” whether or not they [sic] "know" or
understand it. It has the function of
producing an obvious "reality" that social
subjects can assume and accept, precisely
as if it had not been socially produced
and did not need to be "known" at all.
(311)
Kavanagh adds to this a description of ideological
analysis in literary or cultural studies. He describes
such an analysis as:
concerned with the institutional and/or
textural apparatuses that work on the
reader's or spectator's imaginary
conceptions of self and social order to
call or solicit . . . him/her into a
specific form or social "reality" and j
social subjectivity. (310)
Kavanagh's statements emphasize two central components in
the use of ideology within literary studies. The first j
j
is the recognition of a belief— or value— system? the J
second is the mechanisms— modes of production— by which !
that belief system is revealed to individuals.
Participation in an ideology determines an individual's
subjectivity, as that itself is determined by the
I ideology. ,
42
That literary works do "ideological work," in
revealing ideological values to subjects, and that the
existence of literary texts is itself determined by
i
| ideology are aspects of literary study stressed by
Catherine Belsey in her description of the effects and
functions of ideology. She defines ideology as "the sum
I of the ways in which people both live and represent to
! themselves their relationship to the conditions of their
1 existence" (42). And she also states that ideology is to
J be found in language itself. She states that:
| ideology is inscribed in signifying practices
| — in discourses, myths, presentation and
! re-presentations of the way "things" "are"—
| and to this extent it is inscribed in the
' language. (42)
i
j Belsey‘s treatment of ideology as an aspect of critical
J practice expands on Williams' third definition, since it
; links systems of belief— ideology— to language and then
to literature as an instance of a distinct language
use— representation. Literary works are modes of
I
j production for representing ideas, beliefs, and values.
I
I Yet Belsey's view of the inscription of ideology in
j
i language is pursued more aggressively by other literary
j theorists. John B. Thompson, for one, equates ideology
I and linguistic practices so completely that "to study
43
ideology" means "to study the ways in which meaning (or
signification) serves to sustain relations of domination"
(4). He expands his view by stating that "the study of
ideology is fundamentally concerned with language, for it
is largely within language that meaning is mobilized in
the defence of domination" (35). And it is "in the j
discursive practices of everyday life" that the relations j
of domination— what ideology means for Thompson— are j
I
maintained (63). 1
But Thompson's comments also illustrate an additional
component of discussions of ideology within literary
studies, and that is what would best be called the
Marxist view of ideology: that ideology, by definition,
constructs and sustains patterns of domination, in other j
i
words, a cultural hegemony. Thus to study ideology '
within a Marxist critical practice is to locate within
patterns of signification— discursive practices— the
assertion of hegemonic social relationships, whether
based on gender, race, ethnicity, economics, or social |
class. In addition to Thompson, Terry Eagleton, Frederic
Jameson, and Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey have
i
articulated such a consideration of ideology within their j
theoretical statements on literary analysis.
Eagleton defines ideology this way: "... those
modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving, and believing
44
which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and
reproduction of social power" (Literary 15). He also
states:
i
that ideology is the product of the concrete j
social relations into which men enter at a j
I
particular time and place; it is the way
those class-relations are experienced,
legitimized and perpetuated. (Marxism 6)
i
Within his description of ideology, Eagleton identifies
literature as a source of particular ideological !
elements. He states that certain "ideas, values, and \
feelings"— what ideology is— are revealed only through j
literature (Marxism viii), in that ideology "works much j
less by explicit concepts or formulated doctrines than by |
image, symbol, habit, ritual and mythology" (Literary
23). The goal of Marxist literary analysis, then, is to
describe how ideology, as patterns of domination, is
represented in the formations that distinguish literary j
discourse.
Jameson, in essential agreement with Eagleton,
nonetheless formulates his view of ideology and literary
analysis in terms of the ideoloaeme. Using ideology as
i
i
the starting point for literary analysis, Jameson claims j
j
that "the political interpretalon of literary texts" is
the "absolute horizon of all reading and all
I 45
I. . .
jinterpretation" (17). He bases this position on a
|Marxist hermeneutic, which attributes to all high
I culture, including those literary texts perceived as
I
[such, and which proceeds by means of "the decipherment by
i historical materialism of the cultural monuments and
(traces of the past" (299). Jameson stresses that within
! this hermeneutic all cultural texts are "in one way or
I
|another profoundly ideological" (299). Therefore, the
! "aesthetic act" is ideological: "narrative form" has
j "the function of inventing imaginary or formal
'solutions' to unresolvable social contraditions" (79).
Analysis of such narrative forms leads to the
j identification of the ideoloaeme. "the smallest
i
| intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic
i collective discourses of social classes" (76).
i
1 For Balibar and Macherey, literature, what they call
I
I "literary effects," are "part of the ensemble of social
i
j practices" (83) that together make up ideology and
| through which an individual becomes socially constituted.
Thus literature is now "inseparable from given social
practices." Literature must be viewed outside the realm
I of an atemporal and ahistorical aesthetics and be placed
j centrally within the materiality of all social and
: discursive practices. Literature is no longer to be
j perceived only aesthetically, idependently of history nor
46
t
j of the discursive practices that form the context of
literary production and study (86-87).
The ideologies that constitute the points of writing
for Dos Passos and for Fuentes reveal the magnet that Dos
t
I
I Passos' novels became for Fuentes. The ideologies
i
! themselves determine the appeal of Dos Passos' novels for
i
I
Latin American consciousness in the twentieth century.
The literary contact made by means of Fuentes reading Dos
Passos indeed illustrates a marriage of compatible
j ideologies. This is a reformulation of the evidence
i
j previously brought to bear in answering the question of
J why the effect on Fuentes of Dos Passos' novel should
I
i remain so vital throughout Fuentes' literary production.
Several studies have attempted detailed historical
analyses of this influence strictly by stressing literary
developments and formal similarites in the novels. While
1 these previous studies do provide some informative
I
i descriptions of the literary histories and technical
; similarities between Dos Passos' novels and Fuentes',
!
i
J they nonetheless are incomplete in accounting for the
J effect Dos Passos' novels had on the creation of Fuentes' .
j historically grounded narratives.
j CHAPTER II
I
i
{ CARLOS FUENTES IN THE CONTEXT
l
j OF MODERN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
I
!
I Six previously done studies merit special
i
consideration and analysis for their treatment of the
influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes. These
studies, more so than others that only briefly mention
Dos Passos' influence on Fuentes, probe the issue of
literary influence and consider within their individual
[ goals the literary implications of a writer finding
1 material and inspiration from a source outside of the
J writer's own literary and national traditions. But these
! critical studies do overlook two essential points in
| their analyses of the influence of John Dos Passos on
Carlos Fuentes: one is the guestion of why Fuentes found
Dos Passos' so appealing; the second is the unique
position Fuentes holds as a Latin American novelist, as a
; writer from a mestizo culture whose works resist the
I onslaught of Eurocentrism. While learning a narrative
craft from the norteamericano. Fuentes does not sacrifice
i
the Mexican mestizo text to the modern European-based
I text from the United States.
i
j Of these six studies, those completed earlier focus
j their critical attention on Where the Air Is Clear.
48
I
Fuentes7 first novel, while the later ones consider a
larger body of work by Fuentes. Yet one acknowledgment
remains constant in these studies: Manhattan Transfer and
the U.S.A. trilogy provided Fuentes with essentially a
structural and technical model upon which to base the
representation of modern Mexico City in narrative. This
link between what has been called their "city" novels has
been stressed in the research done on Fuentes, in both :
! J
North America and Latin America. In fact, mention of
i
Fuentes7 early reading of Dos Passos7 novels has been a !
i
part of virtually all the early research done on Fuentes
since the publication of Where the Air Is Clear. The [
goal of much of this research, and this is also the case |
j !
j for these six particular studies, has been to place '
Fuentes and his works squarely within the context of the
development of the modern novel, based on models from the
United States and Europe. As argued within these
studies, Fuentes7 specific relationship with the novels
i
of John Dos Passos illustrates the Mexican novel taking
its place alongside the modern novels from America and j
i
Europe. While this historical relationship is described ;
and evaluated in a variety of ways, considerable reliance ;
is placed on Fuentes7 own comments about his reading of
1
European and North American novelists.
49
In their analysis, however, these six studies
structure their critical assessments upon a Eurocentric
base. The paradigms used to discuss literary influence
and the reference points demarcating a literary influence
are European models. They locate similar formal and
thematic properties in works by John Dos Passos and those
by Carlos Fuentes, making the thrust of their analyses
unidirectional, from Dos Passos to Fuentes. While
Fuentes has, as he himself admits, made use of narrative
techniques originating in the work of U. S. and European
novelists, he is constructing, nonetheless, an authentic
modern representation of post-Revolutionary Mexican
consciousness. Fuentes, thus, diverges from Dos Passos
as Fuentes uses him; to write his own unique text,
Fuentes re-writes the model provided by Dos Passos.
Samuel Joseph O'Neill includes Carlos Fuentes' La
region mas transparente. along with Jose Revueltas' El
luto humano. Agustin Yanez' A1 filo del aqua. Juan
Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, and Emma Godoy's £rase un hombre
pentafacico. in his 1965 dissertation on the
psychological-literary techniques in representative
contemporary novels of Mexico. As O'Neill describes it,
the purpose of the dissertation is two-fold: one,
to determine the nature of the
psychological-literary techniques in five
representative novels of contemporary
Mexican literature, and, two, to discover
the efficacy of these literary techniques
in converting thought content and processes
into legitimate prose fiction. (ii)
O'Neill locates the psychological-literary techniques
of his study in "the stream of consciousness novel of the
early twentieth century," also called the "contemporary
psychological novel" (1). This type of novel, O'Neill
states, was the "literary product" of the advances made
by Sigmund Freud in psychiatry (1), but the first to use
the expression "stream of consciousness" was the American
psychologist William James (2). In addition, the
phenomenology of Henri Bergson, which defines existence
as a state of becoming, helped give shape to the stream
of consciousness novel (2-3). O'Neill then traces the
development of this narrative genre starting with Eduard
Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupes (1888), through James
Joyces' Ulysses (1922), to William Faulkner's The Sound
and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). For his
analysis of the five Mexican novels, O'Neill isolates
"techniques in four general areas: characterization,
space, time, and interior monologue" (11). O'Neill then
examines each novel for the use of these techniques
characteristic of the modern psychological novel and
judges how successful the separate literary endeavors
‘ Within O'Neill's argument, the appearance of modern
narrative techniques in these five Mexican novels
!
! coincides with two social realities that confronted
\ Mexico during the post-Revolution era and that began
' finding their way into the newly emerging Mexican
i
; psychological novel: a modern Mexican identity and a
i developing urban social landscape. Mexican novelists
• were now compelled by the need to articulate within their
| narratives a new mexicanidad. what it means to be Mexican
i
i in the twentieth century, along with the Mexican
i
i experience of sprawling urban life. According to
i O'Neill, the contempordneos. one group of novelists,
"imported" the techniques of the modern psychological
novel— "introspective, disinterested subjectivism"
(4)— that ultimately gave form to the new Mexican novels,
whose goal was, as O'Neill puts it, "a search for
identity" (8, 10). The realistic techniques dominating
I
j the novel of the Mexican Revolution and epitomized in the
I
; novels by Mariano Azuela could no longer serve the needs
! of this new generation of novelists. Thus, it seems for
l
I
O'Neill, the infusion of European and North American
novelistic techniques into the modern Mexican novel marks
J off a distinct period in Mexican literary and social
j history and constitutes evidence of a literary influence
i exerting itself on the work of several Mexican novelists.
52 !
Within what now becomes an international dimension to
1
Mexican literary history, the influence of John Dos
I
l Passos on the modern Mexican novel is such that his works
i
1 become "the model for the application of contemporary
' techniques to the city novel” (10).
In his discussion of Fuentes' La region m&s
i
: transparente f O'Neill addresses the issue of literary
; influence in the writing of Fuentes' first novel. Novels
; from Europe and the United States provided Fuentes with
i
j "surrealistic and Freudian techniques" that allowed him
j in his first novel to bring the Mexican novel "into the
i
j universal currents of contemporary literature" (334). At
1 one point in his analysis, O'Neill states that Fuentes'
, "digestion of the contemporary literary techniques of
Proust, Dos Passos, Camus, and Faulkner is open to
discussion" (334), but later states that Fuentes
I
j "attempts to do for Mexico what Dos Passos does for the i
I 1
j entire U.S.A. [sic]. In his sprawling novel [Fuentes]
I
j creates a character representative of every niche and
corner of the capital city" (338-9). For O'Neill, it
seems, the relationship between Fuentes and Dos Passos is ;
i one of similar goals attempted in their respective ;
{ novels, as indeed his analysis of the connection between
]
] the recognized and established North American novelist '
i
I
I
I
53
and the newly emerging yet substantial Mexican novelist
rests on a point by point treatment of similarities.
This analysis, limited though it is by an emphasis on
similarities and on only what Dos Passos made available
to Fuentes, is illustrated by another comment O'Neill j
makes. Here, he indicates a structural difference j
between a character in La region m&s transparente and one J
in Manhattan Transfer. O'Neill stresses that "as the
, I
spectator and conscience of Mexican society, Ixca is
unlike his counterpart, Jimmy Herf, in Dos Passos'
|
Manhattan Transfer" (341); in O'Neill's own words Ixca j
|
"is not tangential to the cultural problem? he is an ;
active participant in the struggle" (341). O'Neill ;
further identifies another structural feature similar in
the novels of both writers. The sketches in La region
mas transparente. which are "intended not only to provoke
background for the big city, but also to arouse definite
feelings of aversion, and compassion," are "akin to the
'Camera Eyes' of Dos Passos, differing in that Fuentes
replaces the author's monologue of the 'Camera Eyes' with
a realistic situation" (371).
In his final comments on the psychological-literary 1
techniques in La reaidn mas transparente. O'Neill places
Fuentes' narrative strategies:
well within the tradition of the 1
psychological novel epitomized in Joyce
54
and descending therefrom: counterpoint of
Huxley and Dos Passos, interior monologue,
temporal intersection and mythical structure
of Joyce, Kafka, and Faulkner, the themes
of anguish and brutality of the
'•Existentialists." (418)
O'Neill's summation of Fuentes' narrative techniques, as
these are illustrated by La reaidn mds transparente,
emphasizes the historical continuity in the development
of the modern psychological novel, of which Fuentes, in
the writing of his first novel, is a recent example.
i
O'Neill sees Fuentes' outstanding quality as a
novelist in the "sheer variety of contemporary techniques
which [Fuentes] employs" (418). Thus, for O'Neill, !
Fuentes' achievement rests on his use of already
established techniques, several of which originate out of
I
the major novels of John Dos Passos, to suit his own ;
purposes in La region m&s transparente. O'Neill's
analysis ignores a major critical factor in the influence
I
of Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes, and that is how Fuentes j
unquestionably asserts a unique Mexican voice through his !
I
use of established European-based narrative techniques. i
I
Joseph Sommers' After the Storm, published in 1968, j
is another critical study of the modern Mexican novel and j
was intended to fill a major gap for North American I
audiences— scholarly and non-scholarly alike— in |
discussions of "Mexico's outstanding contemporary
i
novelists— Agustin Yanez, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes" ;
(ix). With the publication in 1947 of Yanez' The Edge of
the Storm. according to Sommers, the Mexican novel
reaches a new level of maturity" (ix), in that the novel
i
has found for itself "a new synthesis of form and theme J
i
adequate to a changed post-Revolutionary Mexico" (4). In
j
After the Storm. Sommers attempts: i
l
to define the major contours of the modern ;
[Mexican] novel. The approach is to select ■
the principle [sic] authors who are t
responsible for these contours, and to 1
study in some depth their major works to !
date. By charting the conceptual breadth ;
and the formal dimensions, it is possible
to set out the distinctive literary
features which the modern novel has
acquired in Mexico. (xi) ■
Within Sommers' study, mention of the literary influence j
of John Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes appears in the two j
chapters devoted to Carlos Fuentes, one to La region mas J
transparente and the other to The Death of Artemis Cruz ;
(1962), Fuentes7 fourth novel.
In his analysis of the modes of narration found in La
reaidn mas transparente r Sommers identifies Dos Passos as
i
the source of several narrative techniques. Acknowledging j
O'Neill's study, Sommers describes one structural !
component as almost a "direct borrowing of the 'Camera
Eye' used by John Dos Passos in U.S.A." (108). The !
"narrative approximation of the cinematic camera" Sommers j
I
attributes to both Dos Passos as well as to Fuentes'
"personal experiences in the film industry" (ill) as a
56
scriptwriter and close friend of the film director Luis
Bunuel. Dos Passos is the originator of another
I
narrative technique, one ' ‘for communicating environmental
| background" and that "is the narrative pastiche of
I historical fragments, newspaper headlines,
!
| advertisements, social commentary, and popular songs, all
i
I dizzingly intermixed" (111).
I
i Sommers devotes a section of one of the two chapters
on Carlos Fuentes to literary influences, and discusses
j this sub-topic in terms of Where the Air Is Clear by
I
! questioning the critical value of acknowledging— and
I
1 cataloguing— influences. Among the literary influences
i
j that Sommers names and that he says other commentators
! also name are Joyce, Huxley, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Juan
i Josd Arreola, Alfred Doeblin, Jean Paul Sartre, D. H.
Lawrence, and even Octavio Paz (127). But Sommers is not
I so much concerned with just who may have influenced
| Fuentes as with how Fuentes made judicious use of those
• writers whose works had a special appeal for him. As
Sommers states:
to catalogue influences is to
engage in a sterile exercise of
questionable value. More important are
the questions: to what extent was the
author merely copying a particular
j technique, borrowing an idea or theme? To
I what extent did he extract the essence of
the literary experience, learning from it,
J absorbing it and then proceeding to convert
57
it with freshness and originality to his
own purposes? (127)
Clearly for Sommers, these two questions are the only
ones worth asking in any discussion of a literary
influence, and are the two Sommers addresses in his
analysis of literary influence and Carlos Fuentes.
Sommers' discussion becomes a description of what Fuentes
merely borrowed as well as of what Fuentes incorporated
fully into his literary output. But Sommers does not
state what critical understanding Fuentes brought to his
use of foreign literary works.
Stressing literary influence in this way, Sommers
emphasizes in his discussion of Where the Air Is Clear
how "technically derivative" Fuentes' first novel is,
citing Fuentes' comments to this effect about La region
mas transparente in his interview with Luis Harss and
Barbara Dohmann. Fuentes becomes, in Sommers critical
estimation, "an exceptionally avid shopper" in his use of
influences (128). Sommers attributes this technical
derivativeness to the situation of the Latin American
novelist, "who perhaps out of a sense of cultural
inferiority [!] has always felt free to shop abroad for
his forms of expression" (127-8). Sommers then poses the
question "to what extent did he shop wisely, and adopt
I his imports to his own purposes?" (128).
Within Sommers7 framework for considering literary
influence, the influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
I Fuentes becomes "an example of incorporating an
f
! unassimilated technique, copied rather than recreated"
i
J (128). The reason for this evaluation is that Where the
Air Is Clear contains only what Sommers found to be
superficial evidence of the literary influence in its
occasional technical similarity to elements found in Dos
Passos7 novels. The camera-eye technique is a case in
point. This technique, originating from Dos Passos7
novels, does, when used skillfully by Fuentes, enhance
the narrative sophistication of the novel, in that it
specifically:
I
broadens novelistic scope, extending
outward among human types and varied
neighborhoods. It introduces notions
of the complexities of existence and
succeeds in personalizing larger
problems precisely because the vignettes
themselves are original and authentic.
In addition, they contribute as elements
of structural coherence which at other
times is lacking. (128)
Sommers measures this against an inferior example of
Fuentes7 borrowing: Robles7 mental flashback. Sommers
finds this particular instance of Fuentes7 use of Dos
Passos7 camera-eye technique as experimental; it is a
single instance of a flashback constructed out of
"garbled headlines, popular songs and memory fragments,"
not integrated into the "narrative texture" giving thus
59
the "potpourri character of the novel" (128). Thus,
Where the Air Is Clear illustrates the range of
possibilities that Sommers feels can be generated by a
literary influence: from an awkward borrowing to full
integration.
Sommers finally summarizes Fuentes' use of narrative
techniques from abroad by stating that they:
were employed, not primarily in imitation
of world esteemed models, but corresponding
to inner mandates .... Fuentes, more
than any [other modern Mexican novelist],
shopped around for whatever he felt could
extend his vision. At times undigested, as
in the Dos Passos-like headlines in Where
the Air Is Clear, his borrowings were more
often organic to his conception. (185)
While Sommers attempts to analyze the use Fuentes made of
the narrative techniques of foreign novelists, evaluating
the strengths and weaknesses, how much each influence was
tangential or organic and essential to Fuentes' writing,
especially in that of John Dos Passos, his analysis is
inconsistent. Sommers first attributes to Fuentes
unmediated imitation then later the complex acts of
purposeful selection to serve specific goals. In spite
of Sommers' conclusions about Fuentes and Dos Passos, he
provides some explanation— the sense of cultural
inferiority experienced by the Latin American
novelist— for the motives behind Fuentes' incorporation
of the various elements he found appealing in the works
60
of this North American novelist and worth taking into
consideration in his own writing. But again, like
O'Neill, Sommers ignores the crucial changes Fuentes
effected in his use of Dos Passos and other writers. j
One of the earliest book-length studies of Fuentes is .
by Daniel deGuzman. Published in 1972, deGuzman's work j
stresses the intellectual, social, political, and j
I
literary development of Carlos Fuentes up to the 1967 |
i
publication of Zona saarada. Fuentes' seventh work and 1
fifth novel. In detailing the political and intellectual
(
currents that provided Fuentes with the context for his
writing, deGuzman approaches Fuentes not apart from the j
facts of Mexico's history. deGuzman's analysis, then, j
more so than the other five studies, considers Fuentes !
and his works within the complex web of Mexican culture
and literary history in the twentieth century. Inasmuch
as European and North American literature may have
i
contributed something to the kind of novelist Fuentes is, ,
for deGuzman, Fuentes is above all else a Mexican writer; ;
and deGuzman does not hesitate to remind his reader of
this central point of Fuentes' literary pursuits.
The emergence of Fuentes as a powerful intellectual,
political, and literary force within Mexican letters j
I
parallels the "psychological transformation" Mexico ;
itself experienced, starting with the Mexican Revolution
61
and culminating in the six-year presidency of Lazaro
Cardenas in the 1930s. Fuentes and his generation are
the results of a new mestizo culture (31), one that no
longer tolerated denigration at the hands of European
culture but asserted the "fact of being mestizo" (31);
indeed, according to deGuzm&n, Fuentes has been one who
has contributed to this new psychological self-awareness
for Mexico and all mestizos. so much so that deGuzman
describes Fuentes' literature is a "mestizo literature"
(32) .
Within deGuzmdn's critical framework for evaluating
the significance of Fuentes and his work, foreign
literary influences take on a new meaning. They are not
just the sources of discreet literary techniques and
narrative structures, but are essential contributions to
the development of Fuentes' literary perspective as a
Mexican novelist. To be mestizo means to be "eclectic
(ethnically or culturally)" (48), and to be eclectic in a
literary sense means to be derivative. The influence of
non-Mexican writers is evidence of this derivativeness,
and, thus, by extension, of a work's eclecticism. La
region mas transparente is particular evidence of a
literary mestizaiidad:
There is no question that it [La region mas
transparente1 is derivative— the influence
of certain Anglo-American writers is all
too evident, Faulkner, Dos Passes— but by
the same token, what is not derivative?
All young writers are derivative and
Fuentes was only thirty years old.
Derivative is the road to eclectic, and
it is a rare and vast talent indeed that
need not travel. What is eclecticism if
it is not a choosing, a culling, a
selection? Not at random, but a selection
of what is thought best from various
sources. It seems to appear when
powerful or antagonistic forces are in
the field, usually in an era of
heightened historical awareness. (48-49)
What deGuzmdn apparently is saying is that literary
influence, in the context of Mexican literary history and
Fuentes7 place within that history, takes on a central
role in creating a truly "Mexican" literature. The
conclusion to be reached from this observation is that
the Mexican novelist has to become like the "other" in
order to articulate a uniquely Mexican position.
The literary influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
Fuentes assumes, within deGuzman's analysis, the added
significance of cultural development. Fuentes7
development as a writer mirrors Mexico7s development as a
nation after the Revolution. The influence of John Dos
Passos on Carlos Fuentes mirrors the foreign influences
that have contributed to making Mexico the nation that it
is today. As Mexico is a fusion of cultures, deGuzmdn
argues, it, therefore, should not be surprising to find a
similar fusion of literary traditions within one figure,
Carlos Fuentes, Mexico7s greatest living novelist in
63
deGuzmgn's estimation. deGuzman reinforces the
significant role foreign influences have played in the
literary development of Mexico and in Fuentes' own
individual development as a novelist when he points out
that the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. a literary
magazine co-founded by Emmanuel Carballo and Carlos
Fuentes, "subscribed to the theory that a culture can be
profitably national only when it is generously universal"
(65). But deGuzman fails to recognize how Fuentes is
using the term "universal." Fuentes is not referring to
the Eurocentric definition of "universal," which
positions values and experiences specific to European
history as the basis for all human experience over time.
Fuentes defines "universal" as that which makes itself
known in its own voice, not as the "Other." Hence,
deGuzman identifies "Mexican" writing originating out of
literary influence, without regard to the indigenous j
experience which is also a vital part of Mexican social J
I
and literary history. In deGuzman7s analysis, one half i
of the Mestizaiidad is invisible and silent; in Fuentes7 |
definition of "universal," this half is a potent and >
vociferous component of Mexican literary expression.
According to deGuzman, then, literary influence is to
j
be expected in Mexican literature, and is a feature of !
fluctuating quality in the works of Carlos Fuentes. With j
I
64
La region mas transparente. Fuentes attempts to
accomplish a variety of goals. The novel is first
a frame for Fuentes' own theorizing
about the origins, identity, or
directions of the mestizo; it is also an
ambitious and largely successful attempt
to do for Mexico City what John Dos
Passos did for New York in Manhattan
Transfer. But the novel is flawed with
numerous instances of an awkward
eclecticism. (99)
For deGuzman, Fuentes "occasionally combines incongruous
j
elements of style, or even deliberately uses the
technique of abrupt contrasts too often or too heavily"
(95). deGuzman describes Fuentes' style in La region mas
i
transparente as:
an eclectic combination of Aldous Huxley
(Point Counterpoint), John Dos Passos
(Manhattan Transfer. USA), James Joyce 1
(Ulysses), and Fuentes. The Fuentian \
element is chiefly the melieu, the I
setting, both philosophical and [
psychological. (96) j
In his concluding remarks on La region mas j
transparente. deGuzman states that: J
I
by and large, Fuentes has achieved the
job he set himself in this, his first !
novel— he has indeed done for Mexico
what Dos Passos did for New York and in
doing so Fuentes has made Mexico City
as much a part of the 'cultural baggage' !
of the contemporary well-read man as ;
was the Paris of Zola or the New York I
of Dos Passos. (99) i
deGuzman continues his reference to the influence of John
Dos Passos on Fuentes in his observations about Fuentes'
65
other novels. The characters in Fuentes' second novel,
The Good Conscience. are familiar "to the modern reader,
one who has been conditioned already by Joyce and Dos
Passos and Faulkner" (112). And in Fuentes' fourth
novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, the influence of Dos
Passos, in addition to that of Joyce and Faulkner, is
evident more than in the first novel, particularly in
Fuentes' use of "tape recordings" for the representation
of Artemio Cruz' recollections, which are similar to Dos
Passos' "newsreels" and "camera's eye" technique (117).
The representation of the city in narrative is the
basis of two comparative historical studies which include
works by John Dos Passos and by Carlos Fuentes. Wendy
Faris devotes an essay to the development of a collective
voice in the modern novel in both North America and Latin
America. Allan Edward Steele, in his dissertation,
analyzes the city novels of Plo Baroja, John Dos Passos,
and Carlos Fuentes, stressing the line of influence from
Baroja to Dos Passos, and from Dos Passos to Fuentes.
Faris sees "the creation of a literary voice for
populations in cities in towns" as an impetus for
twentieth-century writers in both the Americas (3).
Through a discussion of John Dos Passos' Manhattan
Transfer, Agustln Ydnez's A1 filo del aqua, and Carlos
Fuentes' La region mas transparente. Faris analyzes "the
development of a collective voice in contemporary Mexican <
fiction as it interacts with the same impulse in the j
!
United States" (3). She establishes "two related lines
of development" in the growth of the collective urban
voice in American fiction and in the Mexican novel. The
result of her study is a detailed cataloguing of numerous j
I
similarities shared by the three novels she selected for ;
her study. !
i
John Dos Passos and Carlos Fuentes typify the first j
pattern of development, and, indeed, Paris describes |
i
their historical linkage as an influence: "First, in i
I
urban novels, individual voices are traversed by city ;
noise and popular language, the landscape transfigured by j
i
a special city light, here the line of influence runs j
from Dos Passos to Fuentes" (3). The second line is j
I
evidenced in the connection between Faulkner on the one j
i
hand and Yanez and Juan Rulfo, a contemporary of Fuentes,
I
on the other.
In discussing the three principal novels, Faris
focuses on several structural features which they all j
i
share. She begins with the creation, in these novels, of
a communal protagonist, rather than an individual
, i
protagonist, effected in the novels in one way with i
"communal preludes." The novels also contain a
67
distinctive "texture of prose," indicative of "an
interpenetration of public and private speech" (4).
But almost the entire second half of her essay is
devoted solely to a comparative discussion of Dos Passos'
Manhattan Transfer and Fuentes' La region mas
transparente. and, in the "striking similarities between
them," Dos Passos' influence on Fuentes is confirmed.
The first similarity Faris presents is the "criticism of
urban society" found in both novels that, for her, mean
negative implications of life in a city. Specifically, !
I
I
"strong individuals with integrity do not flourish" in
Dos Passos' New York City nor in Fuentes' Mexico City.
Faris continues the comparison by stressing next the
physical descriptions of the two cities in the novels. |
!
Faris states that Dos Passos and Fuentes "often handle
physical descriptions of New York and Mexico City
similarly." Faris sees this similarity in what she calls t
their "painterly interest in the special quality of city
light" (6). Faris selects Jimmy Herf and Rodrigo Pola as
similar characters that together serve as "another
possible link between Manhattan Transfer and La region
mas transparente (7).
It is in the section on similarities between
i
characters that Faris locates what she calls "an
important underlying conceptual difference between the
68
two works." The similarity is in the appearance of
chance as a causal factor of character interaction and as
a structural element for the advancement of plot; the
distinction is in the quality of chance found in each
novel. Chance in Manhattan Transfer "serves no
mysterious master"; chance is not equated with fate. In
La region mas transparente. "chance connections often
seem to construct meaningful designs" (7). Surprisingly,
Faris makes no attempt to explain Dos Passos' view of
chance in naturalistic terms as many other researchers
have done, among them Donald Pizer.
Yet, in addressing this distinction between Dos
Passos and Fuentes, Faris herself diverges from the
characteristic way the relationship between Dos Passos
and Fuentes has been approached. She apparently
recognizes that the influence also reveals itself through
powerful cultural differences between Dos Passos and
Fuentes. It is to her credit that she alone, out of
these six researchers, includes in her analysis this
crucial component of literary influence within an
inter-American literary context.
But apart from this one brief comment, Faris'
discussion of influence does not extend beyond a listing
and a description of similarities and differences between
Manhattan Transfer and La reaidn mds transparente. With
69
such an analysis, Faris attempts to reveal the
significant contributions to the development of the city
novel Dos Passos and Fuentes have made in their narrative
representations of New York City and Mexico City.
Allan Edward Steele considers the influence of Dos
Passos on Carlos Fuentes in his study of the city novel,
in which Steele identifies and discusses "patterns and
concerns which have a bearing upon the question of the
nature of the city novel," as these can be traced from
Pio Baroja to John Dos Passos, then from Dos Passos to
Carlos Fuentes (4).
Chapter six of the dissertation contains Steele's
comparative study of La region mas transparente. He
compares Fuentes' first novel with Manhattan Transfer.
Point Counterpoint, and Faulkner's Absolom. AbsolomI The
discussion focuses on the narrative technique of these
city novels, and the comparative approach is justified
because, as Steele points out, "it is easily demonstrated
that Fuentes borrowed from these modern English language
novelists." While there is some thematic similarities
among the four novels, Steele traces the thematic
elements of La region mas transparente to Mexican
philosophy (7); and this part of his study is independent
of the section devoted to the influence of Dos Passos on
Fuentes.
70
Steele's emphasis on borrowing as the indicator of a
literary influence continues in his extensive description
of similarities between Manhattan Transfer and La region
mas transparente. Steele acknowledges, at the beginning
of this section, earlier commentary on the literary
connection between Dos Passos' major novels and Fuentes'
first novel. Steele mentions that Emil Rodriguez Monegal
had identified Manhattan Transfer as an antecedent to La
reaidn mas transparente. Steele himself believes
Sommers' After the Storm to be "the most thorough
comparison of La reaidn with the novels of Dos Passos,
Huxley, and Lawrence" (269). In describing his purposes
in this chapter, Steele reveals that he wishes to treat
the techniques in these four novels by "noting the
striking parallels between the novels in the use of
techniques" and by discussing "the effect which the
technique in question creates" (270).
Steele introduces the section on La region mas
transparente and Manhattan Transfer by acknowledging
Fuentes' description of his reading of Dos Passos' major
works in the interview with Emmanuel Carballo. Steele,
however, provides no commentary of his own on the
literary influence. He apparently feels that the
similarities between the novels he will describe will
________ 1
71
more than make clear the ramifications for Fuentes' work
of Fuentes referring to Dos Passos as his literary bible.
The first similarity Steele presents and the one he
calls "the most obvious technique in common" is the short j
vignette. Steele devotes almost ten pages of discussion j
i
to this narrative unit and identifies numerous examples ■
of from both Manhattan Transfer and La region mas
transparente. In his description of these examples,
i
Steele indicates what the vignette contributes within the j
overall structure of the novels and the social commentary j
I
the vignette affords Dos Passos and Fuentes. However,
i
this presentation is flawed because Steele neither !
defines the vignette nor constructs a suitable
j classification for the variety of examples he chose to
j include. ,
I <
| Steele then groups a number of "minor techniques" j
found in both novels. The first of these is "the use of j
I
!
newspaper headlines." Dos Passos experimented with these |
in Manhattan Transfer by having his character read i
i
headlines and by situating "headlines and fragments of |
articles as a run-on pastiche upon the page" (297). In ,
i
La region mas transparente. the newspaper and newsreel !
techniques allow for the inclusion of important dates and
i
events in the Mexican Revolution (299). Both Dos Passos !
i
and Fuentes use songs to create 11'background noise.'" j
72
For Dos Passos, these songs make possible the noting of
the passage of time; while, for Fuentes, these serve to
highlight the "sentimentalism or a fatalism typical of
the songs of Mexico" (299). A third minor technical
similarity is "the reproduction of signs on the page"
which provide a way of generating a particular image of
the city (300).
Steele concludes this section of chapter six by
attributing to Fuentes several novelistic qualities in
terms of Dos Passos and Manhattan Transfer. He states
first "that Fuentes has been eclectic in utilizing
techniques found in Point Counterpoint. Absolom.
Absolom1. and Manhattan Transfer. In La region mas
transparente r while "the city is portrayed in a
descriptive technique different from the particular style 1
of Dos Passos," Fuentes still "uses many techniques found
in Dos Passos' style," and the social scope of the novel
is "as inclusive as" that found in Dos Passos (299—301).
Gerald Martin, in his comprehensive history of Latin
American fiction in the twentieth century, provides what
is by far the most intriguing— and perhaps most
intellectually satisfying— account of international
I
literary influence on Latin America, including the j
influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes. Like [
deGuzm&n, and unlike O'Neill, Sommers, Faris, and Steele,
73
Martin comes to terms with the contact Fuentes had with
Dos Passos' major novels and the role that contact has
played in Fuentes' writing by placing that contact in a
Latin American context. He does so by describing the
influence of the North American novelist on the Mexican
writer within the larger issue of Latin American literary
history and its relationship to Latin American
socio-cultural history. Both deGuzman and Martin connect
Fuentes' reading of Dos Passos' novels, and what others
have repeatedly referred to as Fuentes' borrowing, with
the development of a national social conscience as this
new-found self-awareness enters literary production
through the novel. Martin sets the 1920s to the 1980s as
*
the period to be studied, and he proposes as the
underlying goals of his work to be a rediscovery of "the
persistent unities in Latin America's historical
experience . . . to show how they have been reflected
in its literary expression" (xii).
Foreign literary influence becomes one of five
critical factors in Martin's study of twentieth-century
fiction in Latin America. These factors contribute to
the difficulties researchers encounter in attempting to
come to terms with the many literatures that make up,
since 1918, Latin American fiction in the twentieth
century. The first of these factors is the closeness of
74
the period to the critical perspective of the
investigator. The second is that the literature is
fast-moving. A third is the questions current literary
study has posed about itself and the object of its study.
The fourth is that, during this period, Latin American
literature "began to assert its own creativity,
independence and individual identity." The interaction
between Latin America and external influences becomes the
fifth. This interaction, according to Martin, "becomes
increasingly complex, fertile and difficult to unravel,
superimposing an additional screen of complexity over the
long ideological labyrinth of ethnic, national, social
and cultural identity" which punctuates Latin America's
experience of the twentieth century (6).
Yet in his attempt to provide a comprehensive
framework for his study, Martin organizes the twentieth
century Latin American literary experience into three
major literary moments, each characterized by a foreign
literary presence. The "'Ulyssean'" or Joycean moment
epitomizes the 1920s and Latin America's period of social
realism, from 1915-1945. The Faulknerian moment
followed, and magical realism became the cornerstone of
literary production, from 1945-1960. The 1960s, with its
"boom," is the completion of the two preceding moments.
Since the 1960s, and "along with the whole of Western
75
literature," Latin America has entered the
"'Finneganian,' or possibly 'Borgesian' moment, beyond
which perhaps— for the time being— there may be no where
to go." Martin describes this third moment as the one in
which "myth and history become totally confused,"
"appearing as diametrically opposed," "totally
interpenetrative" or "absolutely identical" (6-8).
It is obvious that Martin understands Latin American
history generally and its literary history specifically
j
in terms of Western European— and this does include the
United States— history and literature. Indeed, at one
point in his introductory chapter, Martin describes the
Latin American myth of the Indian Mother and Foreign
(European) Father as "one version of the great master
narrative of Western history: the road to freedom,
t
progress and development through self-realization" (9). !
i
Simply put, Martin sees the Latin American experience as [
an extension of Western European existence; the presence
of European culture in Latin American existence is
absolute, undeniable, insurmountable, and essential to j
any definition of Latin America.
Identity in Latin America is a duality for Martin,
|
symbolized overwhelmingly in Mestizo culture, and it was j
|
during the mid-nineteeth century when this culture began !
to ponder significant questions for its future. The
76
ideological myth of the European father and the American
mother in the 19th century initiated what Martin refers
to as the "master narrative" of Latin American national
and literary development. This beginning then led,
within literary expression, to images of choices,
crossroads, forking paths or alternative destinies" (13).
The question of illegitimacy and the "unending dialectic
of violation and vengeance" was then and remains "a
central theme of Latin American culture" (16). Two new
i
themes emerged later in the mid-nineteeth century when j
i
"as the national question began to monopolize the debate j
I
about choices for the future" (17): one, civilization i
i
and barbarism; the other, solitude. Latin American |
i
consciousness can be described as a series of
conjunctures of these different, but dialectically
intertwined, elements; and "the reception of all external
!
ideas and influences has been conditioned by this i
l
perspective" (18). !
Since European culture, with its literary component,
l
is a part of mestizo culture, "foreign" literary j
I
influence from North American and Europe become a type of j
"natural" inheritance for the Latin American writer. As ■
i
dualistic culture meant the absorption of European
i
"paternal" elements, a Latin American literature meant
j exploiting the literature of the "father," making use of
77
a literary tradition that was already a part of Latin
American culture. Within Martin's view of Latin American
literary history, then, John Dos Passos' influence is one
of many European and North American literary models that
Latin American writers could claim as their own.
While Martin argues for a distinctive view of foreign
literary influences within Latin American literary
history, his discussion of Dos Passos' influence on
Fuentes is still well within the parameters found in
other discussions of Fuentes' reading and use of Dos
Passos. Along with Faulkner, Dos Passos showed Latin
American writers in the 1930s "how to apply the new
Modernist techniques to narrative fiction and provided
the means for updating the social or regionalist novel"
(198). Dos Passos became for the Latin American urban
novelists a mode in which they "wrote many of their
desolate urban tragedies" (139). One reason for this
attraction generated by Dos Passos' work was that the
techniques found in his novels "suited . . . Latin
America's pluralistic realities" (254). Fuentes himself,
Martin points out, stresses this fact in his interview
with Luis Harss that Martin cites: ". . . the moment
came when the substance of our life found adequate form
in the sort of novel Dos Passos was writing forty years
ago" (qtd in Martin 239). Of Fuentes' first novel,
78
Martin states that this novel of Mexico City is an
adoption of "the literary conception of John Dos Passos
to Mexico City . . . complete with panoramic montage !
and 'seeing eye"' (116), a novel "in a style almost
completely modeled on Dos Passos" (207).
For all their detailed commentary on the influence of
John Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes, these researchers
still overlook significant factors in the relationship
i
between the two novelists. Therefore, in the chapters
that follow, the discussion of ideology will begin to
explain the appeal Doe Passos' novels had and continue to
have for Fuentes; and the discussion of Fuentes'
resistance, by means of his narratives, to Western
cultural dominance will begin to describe more fully what
constitutes the influence of John Dos Passos on Carlos
Fuentes.
I
I
i
79
CHAPTER III
I
ENGAGE AND DEGAGE: IDEOLOGY
AND JOHN DOS PASSOS
i
The ideological imperatives that directed the writing j
of Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy grew out of
the political, intellectual, and aesthetic climate in the
I
United States in the 1920s and 1930s. A recognized !
literary figure in his own time, John Dos Passos, through ;
his writings and political activism, expressed many of
the social and aesthetic values that were having a major !
impact on American society and its literature in the j
twenties and thirties. His four major novels evolved in {
I
response to specific ideological imperatives and helped
give them narrative form. His critical essays, whose ;
subjects ranged from key events and political issues of !
i
his day to reviews of novels and books on various topics, ,
i
discussed critically the aesthetic and cultural issues
that are at the heart of his four major novels. Given
I
the range of Dos Passos' literary and intellectual
i
pursuits, the novelist, thinker, social commentator, and ,
i
political activist behind the novels and essays is one \
i
who bears a remarkable resemblance to a Latin American j
writer: an individual who, through his writings and j
political activism, commits himself to the improvement of
80
the social and political arena at large by exposing
corruption and deceit and the human suffering and
injustice they cause, and whose works exhibit un real
maravilloso. "a marvellous realism," that can only be
described as surreal.
During the 1920s and 1930s, America confronted
several major social, economic, and political crises at
home, and witnessed significant intellectual and
political upheavals abroad. The effects of
late-nineteenth-century urbanization, industrialization,
and immigration continued to be felt. Cities became more
congested and polluted as industry spread, and immigrants
from Europe provided an enormous pool of cheap labor. As !
a result of these economic and social conditions, the
division between economic classes became more and more
pronounced. Enormous wealth accumulated in the hands of
a few, and the poorer working classes, in the East made
up primarily of immigrant ethnic groups from Europe,
swelled. Labor unions in the burgeoning auto, mining,
manufacturing, and textile industries began to form in
attempts to demand improved wages and working conditions,
and offered a collective political voice to the working
masses. But disputes with management often resulted in
strikes, violent confrontations, and mass arrests. For
many, these labor disputes signaled the beginning of
81
outright class struggle and the failure of American
political ideology to ensure political and economic
justice and thus true democracy for all. The Stock
Market Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression
marked the total collapse of America's economic ideology,
that of capitalism motivated by competition and greed.
President Wilson's decision to enter World War I was
met with harsh criticism, as romantic notions of war soon
dissolved under the weight of the realities of full-scale
mechanized combat and patriotic zeal appeared to justify
economic exploitation and to deem any opposition as
subversive and a threat to American security. The rise
of socialism in Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution of
1917 demonstrated the consequence of continued economic
and political repression: the violent overthrow of a
long-established and oppressive oligarchy. As a
political philosophy, socialism was seen by many in
America as the basis for an economically and politically
just classless society made up of workers. Indeed, by
1919 when the Communist Party of the United States was
formed, socialism had already become an "integral part of
i
twentieth-century American life" and was seen as "part of
that American yearning for utopia" (Howe and Coser 1).
It was the Communist Party of the United States that in
fact fueled the movement to re-structure American society
82
based on a ruling proletariat. With political power in
the hands of the proletariat, it was believed,
competition would cease and economic equality would take
its place.10
America also saw three key changes in the aesthetic !
principles that had previously guided imaginative
writing. Within American literary history, paralleling
i
the Black Arts Movement in Harlem and the writing of the J
t
Southern Agrarians at Vanderbilt University, novel
writing of the 1920s and the 1930s pinpoints the moment
when history and fiction merged to become a distinct
narrative mode, when the techniques of literary realism
and naturalism became the tools of satire,11 and when j
writing served a very concrete and explicitly espoused j
political purpose and actively sought for social change
by articulating the experiences of the powerless masses.
i
Indeed, by the 1930s, at the height of the depression,
writers realized and admitted to themselves that they and
their writing "could not exist outside politics"
i
(Bogardus and Hobson 4). Writers in the thirties saw
that they had inherited realism and naturalism, and these
became the technical foundations for "proletarian
fiction" (Bogardus and Hobson 2). The onset of
modernism, with its emphasis on technical and thematic
experimentation in response to the political decline of
83
Europe, affected all writing, as "it was a new force that
writers and critics began to acknowledge, tried to
understand, and turned into practice" (Bogardus and
Hobson 3).
Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A.
trilogy incorporate all these features of the emerging
form of the modern novel: the novels contain
recognizable elements of modernism; they show a strong
political consciousness; and they abound with historical
fact. But Dos Passos also brought to his novels features
of narrative writing that he had encountered in his
extensive reading. In one description he gives of his
novels, Dos Passos names the various writers that
contributed to the kind of novel he set out to write.
Among those mentioned are Stendhal, Thackeray, and
Tolstoy. He was, as he says, "taken with the crystal
literalness of Defoe's narratives and by Fielding's and
Smollett's rollicking satire" ("Contemporary" 239). He
states that he had also "read enough Spanish to be
interested in Pio Baroja's modern revival of the Spanish
picaresque style" ("Contemporary" 239).12 Thus, in Dos
Passos' novels are the dominant elements of American
novel writing of the 1930s combined with the novelistic
writing styles of these historically significent figures !
of the European novel. Dos Passos also brought with him
84
to his writing an interest in Mexican mural painting, in
13th-and 14th-century art, and formal training in
architecture. But it is his political activism, begun
after his discharge from the army for his anti-army
sentiments and service as an ambulance driver during the
war, that contributed significantly to the literary
aesthetic he set out to follow in the writing of his four
major novels.
In the 1920s and 1930s, John Dos Passos was one of a
significant group of artists and intellectuals who
articulated a radical left position toward international
issues, American politics and economics, and aesthetic
pursuits. The specific critisim that Dos Passos
articulated stemmed from objections Dos Passos had
against what he saw as political and economic oppression
in America; Jeffersonian ideals had been forsaken and
replaced by a virulent materialism. Dos Passos'
objections were based on a staunch belief in humanism and
individualism (Landsberg 96) coupled with Dos Passos'
understanding of the aim of life, which he identified as
"the desire to create and the desire to know" (Landsberg
33) .
Humanism and individualism constituted Dos Passos'
personal ideology— his social and moral view— and were
the standards by which Dos Passos measured all human
85
activity. This personal ideology explains both his
activism within the political left and also his rejection
of socialism and communism several years later. In both
instances, Dos Passos was rejecting and opposing
ideologies that were restrictive of an individual's
political freedom. This humanistic individualism
consistently forced Dos Passos to reject and to be
critical of blind acceptance of any political ideology,
and to praise openly those political efforts that valued
the individual and that worked to expand individual
political freedom. Dos Passos never placed political
doctrine above his humanist and individualist principles.
The targets of Dos Passos' criticism reflect his
personal ethic. Dos Passos opposed how the American
political and legal systems aggressively terrorized
dissidents. The Justice Department, for example, on one
of its raids of Communist and Communist Labor Parties,
arrested more that 4,000 suspected Communists in 33
cities. Legal abuses included making arrests without
warrents, "holding the suspects incommunicado, aften
under frightful physical conditions, and starving and
beating the suspects." For Dos Passos these abuses meant
that little distinction existed between "contemporary
American democracy and Bolsheivism" (Landsberg 82). In
addition, Dos Passos saw noncomformity "as a tradition
86
within which anarchists and communists and experimental
poets all had their place" (Lansdsberg 103). Dos Passos
also attacked materialism and viewed the French
Revolution as exemplary in its avowed goals of liberty
and fraternity. And, finally, Dos Passos "wanted a
humanitarian cooperative economy as a means of preserving
civilization from militarism and war" (Landsberg 101-2).
Thus, John Dos Passos expressed in novels and essays
and through political activism the severest criticism of
America's political and social direction. Dos Passos'
contributions to the New Masses, his advocacy on behalf
Sacco and Vanzetti, his support for the Harlan County
miner's strike, and his signing of the radical left's
manifesto in 1932 are all major instances of Dos Passos'
deep concern for lost American ideals and his desire to
return America to those ideals. Indeed, Dos Passos'
readicalism centered on a loss of faith in American
democratic institutions and economic ideology given the
forms these took in the '20s and '30s in America. As
Michael Gold, one of Dos Passos' contemporaries observed
at the time, "Dos Passos suffers with nostalgia for a
clean, fair, joyous and socialized America" (qtd in
Ludington, "Friendship" 56). By this Gold meant that Dos
Passos longed for the "egalitarian, individualistic
87
democracy that had been the ideal before the young nation
a century earlier (Ludington, "Friendship" 56).
From the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, New
Masses was the central voice of the radical left. For
Edmund Wilson, New Masses is one of the origins (the
other is the Playwright's Theater) of the "highly
self-conscious group of social revolutionary writers,"
I and that group included John Dos Passos (Shores 368-9).
Dos Passos was one of the original group of 56 writers
and artists who founded the magazine. While two members
of the group were members of the Communist party,
political affiliation ranged from "the vague socialism of
Van Wyck Brooks to the afflated good will of Waldo Frank"
(Klein 71). Appearing in May of 1926, New Masses
promised the "resurrection of the broad left" and
• espoused the artistic treatment of political causes
(Klein 70). Philosophically, New Masses stressed that
sincere and dedicated artists be responsive to the riches
in subject matter to be found in the political and
economic struggles taking place in America. New Masses
encouraged its writers to recognize:
the stockyards of Chicago, the steel mills
of Pittsburgh, the mines of West Virginia,
the lumber camps of Washington and California,
the lynching of Negroes in the South, the
clothing industries in the East, the Klan,
; tabloid newspapers, automobiles— these have
still to find expression in imaginative,
88
essential and permanent forms. (qtd in
Klein 70)
Dos Passos, along with writers Upton Sinclair, Jean
Toomer, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandberg, and Edmund
Wilson, plus other artists and intellectuals, served as
editor, executive, and contributing editor of the
magazine (Klein 71).
Dos Passos' contributions to New Masses f through
which he denounced political oppression regardless of the
source or the form that it took, include articles on
political issues, such as the Passaic strike of 1926
("300 N.Y. Agitators Reach Passaic"), the Sacco-Vanzetti
case ("The Pit and the Pendulum," "Sacco and Vanzetti"),
and the civil conflict in Spain ("Spain on a Monument");
and articles on aesthetic topics, such as a revolutionary
theater ("Toward a Revolutionary Theater" and "Did the
New Playwrights Theater Fail?"), and the art of the
Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco
as visual chroniclers of the Mexican Revolution ("Paint
the Revolution").
Seven months after the appearance of New Masses. in
December of 1926, Dos Passos, with Upton Sinclair, joined
the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee to advocate on the
behalf of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose
trial for murder epitomized, for many artists and
intellectuals, America's brand of injustice and political
89
oppression. Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists,
Sacco and Vanzetti were charged on May 5, 1920, in the
robbery and murder of a shoe-factory paymaster and his
guard. The two were tried in a Massachusetts courtroom,
were found guilty inspite of solid evidence of their
innocence, and were sentenced to death in the electric
chair. Certainty that radical immigrants, especially two
who had spoken out for improved working conditions, could
never receive a just trial in Massachusetts, where
intolerance of immigrants and resentment toward them were
evident throughout their arrest and trial, spurred the
mobilization of socially responsible individuals and the
formation of a defense committee (Aaron 185—7). For Dos
Passos, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial became the origin of his
"disgust" with American justice; it meant that
individuals could be executed for their beliefs
(Ludington 57).
Historically, no other incident served to solidify
opposition to American economic practices that were
exploiting the working class than the Sacco-Vanzetti
case. One historican describes the situation brought
about by the case this way: "Underlying political
discontent was dramatically manifested by the fervent
involvement of John Dos Passos and other writers in the
Sacco-Vanzetti defense campaign" (Wald 46). The case
served, in the minds of many, as "another episode in the
conspiracy of capitalism to single out its most dangerous
foes in the class war and to eliminate them" (Aaron 187).
The defense committee organized demonstrations, and
individual members wrote articles and letters vehemently
attacking the injustice of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. For
Dos Passos, according to one of his biographers, the
Sacco-Vanzetti case "supplied a new impetus for his [Dos
Passos7] studying American society--its leaders, its
myths, its ideologies, its sources of information"
i
(Landsberg 143), and the result of this impetus is U.S.A.
As a member of the committee, Dos Passos wrote about
the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and he denounced it as the
ultimate illustration of the injustices of American
i
I
capitalism. The case found it way into a number of his j
essays, a pamphlet, and the U.S.A. trilogy. His 1927
review of The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti by
Eugene Lyons for New Masses points out the significance
of the case for writers of conscience by reminding the
reader that:
every detail must be told and retold.
Sacco and Vanzetti must not have died in
vain. We must have writing so fiery and
accurate that it will sear through the
pall of numb imbecility that we are
again swaddled in after the few moments
of sane awakening that followed the shock
of the executions. America must not be
allowed to forget. All the elements on
the public stage who consider themselves
alive and who are considered alive,
college professors, writers, labor
leaders, prominent liberals, protested
that they were mighty shocked and that if
the state of Massachusetts went ahead
with the executions .... Workers
all over the country felt their blood
curdle at the thought. Well, it has
come to pass. Well, we have protested.
Our blood has curdled. What are we
going to do now? ("Sacco" 99)
The demands Dos Passos specifies here are the ones he
followed in the writing of his four major novels.
I
Dos Passos also wrote his own account of the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, Facing the Chair: Story of the
Americanization of Two Foreianborn Workmen, published in
1927. Here, Dos Passos traces the incidents that led to
I
I
the arrest of the two men and describes the phases of the j
trial and the appeals of the conviction. The irony of j
the workmen's "Americanization" is made painfully clear
throughout Dos Passos' account. Dos Passos details the
attitudes, biases, prejudices, and political motives that
led to the guilty verdict and subsequent execution of the
two workers. He describes the two prisoners at one point
as feeling "themselves being inexorably pushed towards
the Chair by the blind hatred of thousands of wellmeaning
citizens, by the superhuman involved stealthy soulless
mechanism of the law" ("Pit" 91). Dos Passos wrote about
Sacco and Vanzetti again when he included the arrest and
92
trial at the end of The Bia Money, the third novel of his
trilogy.
After the work on the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense
Committee Dos Passos next became involved in the
struggles of the Harlan County miners. He had been
invited, in 1931, by his friend Theodore Dreiser to
accompany him and others to observe the working
conditions of the men and to record the testing of free
speech as the workers dealt with management for improved
conditions (Ludington Biographical 381). The conditions
Dos Passos found for the men as well as for their
families were unbelievably tragic. Deprivation and
oppression were everyday aspects of their lives.
As he did for Sacco and Vanzetti, Dos Passos used the
pen to denounce this situation in Kentucky and called for
a relentless outcry against it by other politically
responsible individuals. In a 1932 letter Dos Passos
lists the horrendous living conditions of the miners,
including "crumbling shacks," "a few crumbs of cornbread
a piece of salt pork . . . a few pinto beans
for food"; and he also stresses their lack of political
power: "Then they face the entire armed force of the
law, which in Kentucky, means vicious courts, jails,
teargasbombs, guns— manned by thugs known to have been
/imported/ especially for the miners" (Fourteenth 401).
The plight of the miners and the 1931 strike was recorded
in Harlan Miners Speak. the report of Dreiser's
investigating group published in 1932. The events in
Kentucky also appeared in The Big Money.
Dos Passos' criticism of American economic practices
culminated in the framing of the radical left's
manifesto. Dos Passos' radicalism had originated out of
a loss of faith in American democratic institutions and
economic ideology. It followed, then, that the old
social order, with its corrupted institutions, had to
give way to a new order. Such was the message of the
manifesto issued by the radical thinkers in 1932. With
Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Edmund Wilson, and Sherwood
Anderson, John Dos Passos signed the "Manifesto" that
called for a revolution that:
must not be understood as simply a revolt
against the economic chaos of today. It
is an immediate organ of creation. We
believe that in imaginative works, in
philosophic thought, in concrete activities
and groups, the nucleus and the framework
of the new society must be created now, (qtd
in Bogardus and Hobson, 11)
The manifesto argued that:
free enterprise had proved bankrupt. New
social forms, a new social order, new
human values were needed. A society
stripped of the profit motive and of
competition would evolve a changed
social philosophy. (Edel xvii)
94
The manifesto saw in American economics "the exploitation
of the many for the profit of the few," and offered as a
solution to this economic inequality "a temporary
dictatorship of the class-conscious workers" (qtd in Edel
xvii). The Manifesto, while calling for open revolution
against American capitalism, also vigorously encouraged
its followers to pursue "revolutionary" goals through the
arts. Dos Passos not only demonstrated his radicalism by
signing the document, but also, through his novels,
eloquently and compellingly practiced it.
Such a "marriage" of political activism and artistic
endeavor, in fact, distinguishes the 1930s American
writer. One general description of the American writer
in the 1930s stresses the relationship between the
writer, the writer's art, and the writer's era:
The American writer of the 1930s reported
and reflected the age . . . . No one
sensed the ordeal of depression any more
deeply or intensely than did artists and
intellectuals; it was they who faced the
experience most questioningly and sought
to understand and to articulate its
cultural meanings most clearly and
forcefully. (Bogardus and Hobson 1)
The emphasis in this description on reporting and
reflecting an age and on seeking to understand and
articulate the meaning of that age in a clear and
forceful manner is echoed in another description of the
writer in 1930s America:
The 1930s was preeminently a period in
which men [sic] tended to identify their
personal problems with social solutions,
to see their private experiences in terms
of public events. This was particularly 1
true for the striking number of writers ;
who were themselves in their thirties ;
during the depression; the close j
correspondence of their age to the decade
gave them a special sensitivity to the
relationship between the individual and
history. Having literally grown up with
the century, they felt an additional
obligation to help shape the country's i
future course. Consequently they adopted j
a radical stance as a way of expressing ,
this general desire for community and 1
social responsibility. (Pells 169)
The desire for community and social responsibility is
identical to the enterprise Dos Passos set out to
accomplish in his novels. And that enterprise reached
its zenith in the writing of Manhattan Transfer and, i
i
especially, U.S.A. Perhaps no other writer of his time
sought to contain in narrative form the central events in
American political and social history as did John Dos I
Passos.13 In the words of Edmund Wilson, "Dos Passos j
seems the only one of the novelists of his generation who j
i
is concerned with the large questions of politics and j
society" (Shores 449-50). His four major novels best !
exemplify the coming together of historical fact and !
imaginative form that marks the American novel of the
1920s and 1930s. As his four major novels illustrate
j this new narrative form, Dos Passos' numerous essays and
' i
96
interviews specify the goals and techniques he wished to
combine artfully in his "chronicles."
Central to Dos Passos' novel-writing aesthetic, and
what makes him such a recognized example of the 1930s
writer, is the inclusion of historical fact within the
narrative text of the novel. Dos Passos made this point
about history and the novel in 1928 when he said: "The
only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment
and vicarious living his books give the people who read
them, is as a sort of a second-class historian of the age
he lives in" ("Statement" 115). Later, in 1934, Dos
Passos re-stated this view when he described the only
acceptable work (endeavor) a novelist should be concerned
with:
The business of a novelist is, in my
opinion, to create characters first and
foremost, and then to set them in the
snarl of the human currents of his time,
so that there results an accurate j
permanent record of a phase of history.
Everything in a novel that doesn't work
towards these aims is superfluous or, at
best innocent day-dreaming. ("Business"
160)
The factual events that constitute the historical record
were to be given key positions in the novel, such that
the imagined characters are forced to confront and deal
with them in the same way that the people who did live
that history had to. In addition, accuracy in historical
recounting is to be valued above all else. Dos Passos
97
re-affirmed this value when, in a 1968 interview for the
Paris Review, he was asked the following: "Always, then,
you have been observing for the record?" And Dos Passos
replied: "Very much, I think . . . the desire to
observe, to put down what you see as accurately as
possible, is still paramount" (71).
The emphasis on history remains consistent in Dos
Passos7 comments on his novels. The most compelling
evidence of this emphasis on history in the novel is Dos
Passos7 description of his novels as "Contemporary
Chronicles" ("What" 268). He refers to his novels, in
fact, as "a satirical chronicle of the world I knew"
("Contemporary" 239). As chronicles, his novels place
minimal stress on the imaginative construction of plot
and setting and, instead, rely exclusively on history to
advance the narrative and be a major catalyst for
character development and conflict. Conflict is based on
characters dealing with historical fact. As a
consequence of this aesthetic value now placed on history
in the novel, the reader of these chronicles is given a
lesson in history, in the political, economic, and social
complexities of living at a particular and specific j
|
historical moment.
Dos Passos has further elaborated on the novel as
chronicle by stipulating how the individual writer makes
98
use of personal experience in designing historically-
based narratives. He describes the procedure and its
effect this way:
The basic raw material [for the novel] is
everything you've seen and heard and felt,
it's your childhood and your education and
serving in the army, and travelling in odd
places, and finding yourself in odd
situations. It is those rare moments of
suffering and delight when a man's private
sensations are amplified and illuminated
by a flash of insight that gives him the
certainty that what he is seeing and
feeling is what millions of his fellowmen
see and feel in the same situation only
heightened. Seen a little sharper perhaps.
This sort of universal experience made
concrete by the individual's shaping of it,
is the raw material of all the imaginative
arts. These flashes of insight when strong
emotions key all the perceptions up to
their highest point are the nuggets of
pure gold. ("Contemporary" 239)
This description sharply echoes the characteristics of
the 193 0s writer: one who through writing brings into
greater focus the experiences of the larger society by
intensely feeling that same experience himself.
In addition to expressing Dos Passos' understanding
of the relationship between the novelist and his
narrative texts, this passage also describes the
aesthetic principle Dos Passos followed in his writing,
and that is the principle of engage and degage, the view
that narrative works must be paradoxically separate from
but still simultaneously involved with the historical
world surrounding it. Dos Passos describes his aesthetic
principle this way: I
!
I
Artistic works to be of lasting value ;
must be both engaged and disengaged.
They must have a certian lift, a certain
aloofness that separates them from the
obsessions of the hour. At the same
time they must encompass— in no matter
how modest or fragmentary a way— the
whole range of the human spirit.
("What" 273) |
I
In applying this principle to the writer, Dos Passos j
states:
The artist must be engage. The artist !
must be degagd. He must free himself j
from the propaganda and the demagoguery |
of his age . . . . For the novelist,
his work is an endless struggle between
his passions and prejudices and his need
to turn them to good purpose in the I
objective description of the life around ■
him. ("What" 273)
The novelist, according to Dos Passos, is not to be i
overwhelmed by either the political movements that define I
his era nor by his own political affiliations and j
i
tendencies. The effective novelist does not deny these, |
I
but is able to shape them in such a way so that an
objective historical chronicle emerges out of the
narrative.
In his essays and interviews, Dos Passos often
includes comments on the writing of his chronicles. j
These comments on his technique as a novelist detail how
Dos Passos was able to fulfill the demands of novel
1 0 0
writing that he propounded in his statements on the novel
in America. Of U.S.A. especially, Dos Passos has made
several observations about the trilogy's genesis and !
evolution. In his development as a novelist, Dos Passos j
j
"dreamed of using" all he had learned from his reading, j
from Stendhal to Baroja. To produce his satirical j
chronicles he "felt that everything should go in: j
popular songs, political aspirations and prejudices, !
ideals, hopes, delusions, crackpot notions, clippings out
of the daily newspapers" ("Contemporary" 239). These ;
constitute for Dos Passos the raw material of history.
The satirical potential of these Dos Passos became aware
of in the early part of the century. He describes the (
i
revelation this way:
i
Initially, my generation . . . believed
that nineteenth century civilization had
progressed to a point where wars were no !
longer needed. Then, suddenly, this
fantastic series of massacres broke out j
in Europe. I was horrified by it all. j
The academic community became sold on the j
war. This was my first experience with i
the fantastic way people's minds became
imprinted with slogans. Overnight, I
almost, men I'd known at Harvard who were j
quite respected . . . turned from j
extremely reasonable beings into fanatical !
Hun haters. ("Interview" 277) j
I
Dos Passos is obviously very critical here of the '
response the propagandistic slogans generated. This
criticism surfaces in the novels through the
i
organizational placement of the raw data of history: the I
"everything" Dos Passos felt should be included in the
chronicles.
In consciously designing historical documents in the
»
writing of the U.S.A. trilogy, Dos Passos devised a
multi-structural and multi-stylistic narrative made up
different units. Newsreel, Camera Eye, biography, and
running narrative are intertwined to achieve two |
I
necessary effects: to represent the power of history |
I
within the lives of individual characters, and to
satirize American economic and political ideology. Dos
Passos once described how three of these units were j
intended to function together in the volumes of the |
trilogy: j
f
In an effort to take in as much as j
possible of the broad field of the lives j
of these times, three separate sequences I
have been threaded in and out among the j
stories. Of these The Camera Eve aims to ,
indicate the position of the observer and
Newsreel to give an inkling of the common j
mind of the epoch. Portraits of a number
of real people are interlarded in the
pauses in the narrative because their
lives seem to embody so well the quality
of the soil in which Americans of these I
generations grew. ("Introductory" 179)
Another description further elaborates on the purpose the
different units serve:
The Newsreels were intended to give the
clamor, the sound of daily life. In the i
Biographies, I tried to produce the
pictures. . . . I have always paid a
good deal of attention to painting. The
period of art I was very much interested
J
1 0 2
in at that time was the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. Its tableaux with
large figures of saints surrounded by a
lot of little people just fascinated me.
I tried to capture the same effect in
words. ("Interview" 283)
Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A. expand the realm of ;
i
literary naturalism and realism to form a satiric picture
of the major metropolitan center of the United States and
of the country as a whole. The four novels are
structured around very clearly indicated historical
facts. As chronicles, Manhattan Transfer captures and
historical realities of New York City, while U.S.A..
being more inclusive in scope, narrates the historical j
I
I
condition of the country during the first three decades
of the twentieth century. All four novels represent
individuals living through the historical realities
surrounding them and all capture the vagaries of American
life at specific historical moments.
I
Dos Passos' criticism of life in America's }
I
representative modern urban landscape emerges out of the j
l
novel's structure, characters, and images. Fragmented
lives, economic motivation at the expense of human
emotional need, and absence of moral certitude all point
I
|
to an undesireable way of life that comes to epitomize i
American urban society. In Dos Passos' narrative
rendering of New York City, what could be seen as the
highest achievement of American political, economic, and
103
industrial might brings about a way of life that values
monetary gain at the expense of the integrity of human
need and compassion. Indeed, Manhattan Transfer can be
described as the representation of the corruption of the
American success myth as it unfolds on the streets and in
I
the highrises of New York City. j
The novel is structured as a series of fragments that
interconnect the lives of different characters. These
fragments, as structural units in the narrative,
I
highlight the discontinuity of life to be found in an
urban environment, allow for sharp contrast through
juxtaposition, and stress the parallel unfolding of j
individual lives. No spiritual city is to be found here, j
i
Dos Passos makes painfully clear that New York City is j
the stage upon which the characters play out the American :
myth of success. For some the myth is a reality and '
wealth is gained. For others, the myth leads only to
failure and poverty. Economic gain is the life's blood
of New York City, and the characters in Manhattan
Transfer direct their lives based on the tenets of
!
I
wealth.
Like other novels of the early twentieth century that
focus on the urban expience in America, Manhattan
Transfer presents a city populated by individuals whose
careers and lives provide a cross section of the social
104
1
microcosm a dense urban environment often becomes. Dos !
t
Passos' New York City contains professionals: George
Baldwin is a lawyer; Jimmy Herf is a newspaper reporter.
The city also has individuals who achieve a level of
social and questionable financial success: Congo is an
i
immigrant Frenchman who becomes a wealthy bootlegger; Gus ,
i
« a • a • • 1
McNeil begins as a milkman and later wins political i
office as an assemblyman. Other careers are represented
as well: Ellen Thatcher is an actress; Joe O'Keefe is a
i
labor organizer.
The central image for New York City is, of course, j
the subway, with its rapid, efficient, and impersonal j
mode of transportation that shuttles people from place to j
place and accenturates the chance meetings and hectic
pace that make up life in the city. Linda Wagner
describes this element of the novel:
Central as an image for lives toughing
and diverging, the subway is just one of j
the images of modern invention that
permeate Manhattan Transfer (along with
skyscrapers, steamrollers, trains, and
i
mechanical doors). (49) I
i
t
i
The images that Wagner lists surface throughout the
narrative and characterize the activity of the city that
makes up the actual physical environment of the city.
1 0 5
Dos Passos also adds the sounds and smells of the city
that envelop the characters. But at the beginning of
each chapter within the three sections of the novel, Dos
Passos also includes, in a epigraph-like fashion, an
expressionist passage on a specific aspect of the city.
In these passages as well, Dos Passos often emphasizes
movement within the city. At the beginning of "Fire
Engine," this passage appears:
Such afternoons the buses are crowded into
line like elephants in a circusparade.
Morningside Heights to Washington Square,
Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes
and flappers joggle hugging downtown
uptown, hug joggling gray square after
gray square, until they see the new moon
giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty
wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in
their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.
(202)
And at the beginning of "Steamroller," this passage
appears:
Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets.
Dark presses light the steaming asphalt
city, crushes the fretwork of windows and
lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks
and ventilators and fire-escapes and
moldings and patterns and corrugations
and eyes and hands and neckties into
blue chunks, into black enormous blocks.
Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure
windows blurt light. Night crushes bright
milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen
blocks until they drip red, yellow, green
into streets resounding with feet. All the
asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from
lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among
wheels, stains rolling tons of sky. (112)
1 0 6
Both passages highlight an aspect of the city—
transportation, dusk in the city— and do so by lending
each quality an oppressive sense. The comparison to
elephants and the description of Sunday as dead in the
first passage suggests a hostile environment. The
intensive personification of the "activity" found in the
city at dusk in the play of light and dark transforms a
common natural event into a moment of resistence to an
exertion of force. The surreal illustrated by these
passages appears in greater depth in the trilogy and may
be a key factor in Fuentes7 evalutation of Manhattan
Transfer; with this novel, Fuentes realized the
possiblity of "inventing" a city, what he then
consciously attempted to do in writing La region mas
transparente.
To these critical descriptions of the city, Dos
Passos adds critical portrayals of specific social
attitudes and values. Among these are the attitude
toward money, the workings of government, the role of
business, and personal morality. In the last fragment of
the chapter "Tricks," Ed Thatcher, a prosperous
businessman, is forced to re-examine a business decision
he had earlier made. Dos Passos describes his musings
this way:
He leaned back in his chair and stared out
of the window. The buildings were going
1 0 7
dark. He could just make out a star in
the patch of sky. Ought to go out and
eat, bum for the digestion to eat
irregularly like I do. Suppose I'd taken
a plunge on Viler's red hot tip. Ellen,
how do you like these American Beauty
roses? They have stems eight feet long,
and I want you to look over the itinerary
of the trip abroad I've mapped out to
finish your education. Yes it will be a
shame to leave our fine new apartment
looking out over Central Park . . . .
And downtown; The Fiduciary Accounting
Institute, Edward C. Thatcher, President
Blobs of steam were drifting
up across the patch of sky, hiding the
star. Take a plunge, take a plunge .
they're all crooks and gamblers anyway
take a plunge and come up with
your hands full, pockets full, bank
account full, vaults full of money. If
I only dared take the risk. Fool to waste
your time fuming about it. Get back to
the FanTan Import. steam faintly ruddy
with light reflected from the streets
swarmed swiftly up across the patch of
sky, twisting scattering.
Goods on hand in U. S. bonded warehouses
$325,666.00.
Take a plunge and come up with three
hundred and twenty-five thousand, six
hundred and sixty-six dollars. Dollars
swarming up like steam, twisting
scattering against the stars. (110-111)
The emphasis on earning money weighs heavily on Thatcher,
who had earlier lost his wife and now has a grown
daughter.
In the chapter "Dollars," Dos Passos illustrates the
self-generating urgency to make the city grow. In a
conversation between George Baldwin and Phil Sandbourne,
I
I the topic turns to future plans for the city;
1 0 8
"How's the old man?" asked Baldwin as they
went out the door.
"Ole Specker? Bout on his last legs .
but he's been thataway for years poa le
soul. Honest George I'd feel mighty mean
if anythin happened to poa ole Specker
He's the only honest man in
the city of New York, an he's got a head
on his shoulders too."
"He's never made anything much by it,"
said Baldwin.
"He may yet . . . . He may yet . . . .
Man you ought to see his plans for all
steel buildings. He's got an idea the
skyscraper of the future'll be built of
steel and glass. We've been experimenting
with vitrous tile recently ....
cristamighty some of his plans would
knock yer eye out . . . . He's got a
great saying about some Roman emperor
who found Rome of brick and left it of
marble. Well he says he's found New York
of brick an that he's goin to leave it
of steel . . . steel an glass. I'll
have to show you his project for a
rebuilt city. It's some pipedream.
(75)
Greed in business is depicted along with the other
forces exerting pressure in the city. At one point the
issue of a workers strike is discussed by a
representative of the railroad and shipping yards:
Phineas P. Blackhead was a lanky man
with silver hair and a red hawkface;
he slipped back into the mahogany
armchair at his desk and rang an
electric bell. "All right Charlie,
show en in," he growled at the two-
headed office boy who appeared in
the door. He rose stiffly from his
desk and held out a hand. "How do
you do Mr. Storrow . . . How do
you do Mr. Gold. . . . Make
1 0 9
yourselves comfortable ....
That's it. . . . Now look here,
about this strike. The attitude of
the railroad and docking interests
that I represent is one of frankness
and honesty, you know that ....
I have confidence, I can say I have the
completest confidence, that we can settle
this matter amicably and agreeably,
of course you must meet me halfway ....
We have I know the same interests at heart,
the interests of this great city, of this
great seaport. . . .Mr. Gold moved his
hat to the back of his head and cleared
his throat with a loud barking noise.
"Gentlemen, one of two roads lies before
us . . . ." (96-97)
Blackhead's true intentions are made clear by the tone of
his words and the repetition of his "honest" interests. i
Paralleling the political and economic workings
taking place in the city are the personal drives. Dos
Passos has assembled within the novel individuals whose
personal needs are set aside for the pursuit of financial
and social success. Ellen Thatcher, Bud Korpenning, who
commits suicide, and Jimmy Herf, the central observer in
the novel, all suffer personal tragedies and loss within
the city. Ellen Thatcher, while gaining some success as
an actress, experiences betrayal at the hands of the men
who profess "love" for her. When she realizes that she
has lost her true love, Stanwood Emery, she is left in
i
the city with a spiritless life. She becomes a "chic !
automaton" (Wagner 52).
1 1 0
Bud Korpenning's job as a dishwasher in a hash house
belies the myth of opportunity and economic prosperity
symbolized in the very existence of the metropolis that
is New York. The description of Bud's job contrasts
sharply with the wealth that can be had in the city:
Plates slip endlessly through Bud's greasy
fingers. Smell of seill and hot soapsuds.
Twice round with the little mop, dip, rinse
and pile in the rack .... Knees wet
from spillings, grease creeping up his
forearms, elbows cramped. (42)
Bud's suicide at the end of the first section of the i
J
novel serves as a testimony to the harsh contrast between j
what the city promises and what can really be achieved.
As he daydreams of possible success,
Bud is sitting on the rail of the bridge.
The sun has risen behind Brooklyn. The
windows of Manhattan have caught fire. He
jerks himself forward, slips, dangles by a
hand with the sun in his eyes. The yell
strangles in his throat as he drops. (125)
The individual has little defense against the economic
forces of the city.
Jimmy Herf, the newspaper reporter and central
consciousness of the novel, has found, by the end of the
novel unfulfilled promises in the city. Instead of the
human community and financial success suggested by the
commerce and interactions found in the city, Jimmy has
I l l
found only isolation and aimlessness. His last walk
through the streets of New York City and his last comment
serve as Dos Passos' final statement on American urban
life in the early part of the century:
Sunrise finds him walking along a cement
road between dumping grounds full of
smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines
redly through the mist on rusty donkey
engines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of
Fords, shapeless masses or corroding
metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of
the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are
beginning to raise blisters on his big
toes. At a cross-road where the warning
light still winks and winks, is a
gasoline station, opposite it the
Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he
spends his last quarter on breakfast.
That leaves him three cents for good
luck, or bad for that matter. A huge
furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has
drawn up outside.
"Say will you give me a lift?" he asks
the redhaired man at the wheel.
"How fur ye goin?"
"I dunno .... Pretty far." (404)
Jimmy Herf has become the wandering penniless man— the
American picaro— who will appear again to frame the
narrated history in the U.S.A. trilogy.
With The 42nd Parallel appearing in 1930, Dos Passos
initiated the unfolding of his trilogy five years after
the publication of Manhattan Transfer. Many technical
features used in the chronicle of New York City find
their way into the volumes of the trilogy. To represent
1 1 2
the modern sense of the United States, Dos Passos fused
together a multiplicity of narrative structures, prose
styles, and protagonists.14
As Dos Passos has himself stated, the Camera Eye
reflects his own consciousness of the state of the
country. The 51 Camera Eye segments, written as stream
of consciousness, serve as the representation of the
understanding and turmoil experienced by one individual
mind— Dos Passes— to history. The 58 Newsreel sections
structure the everyday language of newspaper headlines,
songs, and expressions into a litany of attitudes,
values, and historical facts. They serve as a recurring j
example of how elements from different media combine !
together to establish the ethos of an era. The
biographies, in expressionist style, detail the lives of
individuals who left a mark— in politics, economics,
philosophy, history, and the arts— on life in the United
States during the first three decades of the twentieth
century. Together, the Newsreel sections and Biographies
endow the trilogy with a deep historical context that
transforms the narrative to historical chronicle. The
running narratives represent the lives of fictional
characters whose experiences dramatize the day to day
consequences of the history detailed in the Newsreel and
biography segments. Through the organization of these
J
1
1 1 3
different components, Dos Passos is able to effect very
pointed criticism of the moral, social, and political
values that make up the United States.
As much as the text of Manhattan Transfer is a full
representation of New York City, the text of U.S.A. is a
full representation of the dominant historical milieu of
United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The trilogy is framed by a prologue entitled "U.S.A." and
the final segment entitled "Vag." The setting of the
prologue is urban— buildings, bridges, streets; noise,
crowds, movement; a solitary figure walking fast. The
unnamed young man is one with "No job, no woman, no
house, no city" (The 42nd Parallel -xx). He is the
American male who wanders alone, isolated but for the
sounds that still enter his ears, sounds from his
childhood and sounds from the land in the speech of the
people, of his family, and of the country:
it was the speech that clung to the ears,
the link that tingled in he blood; U.S.A.
U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A.
is a group of holding companies, some
aggregations of trade unions, a set of
laws bound in calf, a radio network, a
chain of moving picture theaters, a
column of stockquotations rubbed out
and written in by a Western Union boy
on a blackboard, a public library full
of old newspapers and dogeared
historybooks with protests scrawled on
the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the
the world's greatest river valley
fringed with mountains and hills.
1 1 4
U.S.A. is a set a big mouthed officials
with too many backaccounts. U.S.A. is
a lot of men buried in their uniforms
in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the
letters at the end of an address when
you are away from home. But mostly
U.S.A. is the speech of the people. (xx)
This prologue, while setting the critical tone of the
trilogy, identifies those components of U.S.A. that will
be examined in detail: business, politics, personal
values, the family, the city, and language as the basis for
them.
Dos Passos constructs sharp contrasts in the
arrangement of the four distinct segments: Newsreel,
Camera Eye, Biographies, and Narratives; and these
contrasts form his critical view of the national
character. Wealth is contrasted with poverty; the
working class is contrasted with the upper class; greed
and selfishness are contrasted with generosity and
altruism; the struggles of organized labor are contrasted
with the abuses of management; personal gain is
contrasted with self-sacrifice; language used to deceive
is contrasted with language used to enlighten.
The 42nd Parallel begins with the end of the Spanish-
American War, and the last entry of Newsreel I, which
opens the novel, is a call for America to now take its
rightful place as an international leader:
1 1 5
In responding to the toast, "The Twentieth
Century," Senator Albert J. Beveridge said
in part: The twentieth century will be
American. American thought will dominate
it. American progress will give it color
and direction. American deeds will make
it illustrious. (29)
The greatness of America expressed in the Senator's
response is immediately followed— and as a consequence
satirized— by the first narrative "Mac," one of the two
principle narratives in the trilogy's first volume.
"Mac" tells the story of Fainy McCreary and his immigrant
Irish family who are struggling laborers in the
manufacturing industry. Through a series of hardships,
Mac eventually becomes a radical, goes to Mexico, and
fights alongside Zapata in the Mexican Revolution. Mac's
narrative takes place amid a background made up of the
biographies of the socialist Eugene Debs, who opposed
participation in World War I, the industrialist Andrew
Carnegie, the orator William Jennings Bryant, and the
union organizer Bill Haywood. Mac's narrative is one of
several that serve to raise objections to economic
injustice in the United States.
The other key narrative in The 42nd Parallel is that
of J. Ward Morehouse, and his combines with that of
Eleanor Stoddard and later with that of Eveline Hutchins
to form the account of both the businesses and the types
of individuals who are on the economic and social
1 1 6
ascendancy. Morehouse builds a very successful public
relations firm and advertising agency because he is able
to manipulate language to mask or alter the truth. The
inherent deceit in this type of business mirrors the
moral corruption of Morehouse's sexual promiscuity. With
Eleanor Stoddard, Eveline Hutchins establishes a
successful business in interior decorating. Their
promiscuous behavior also reflects the deterioration of j
morality and calls into question the kind of leadership
America is to undertake in the new century. With the
narratives of Mac and Morehouse presented together in the
first novel, the conflict between the working classes and
upper classes begins to take shape. The novel ends with
the first appearance of Charley Anderson's narrative.
1
His will later be a dominant narrative in the third
i
volume.
Against the background biographies of the radical
journalists Jack Reed and Paxton Hibben; the politicians
Randolph Bourne, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson;
the union worker Joe Hill; and the industrialists J. P*
Morgan and Wesley Everest, Nineteen Nineteen narrates a
cross-section of American life up to the Armistice. Joe
Williams, a restless sailor, finds no happy life with ;
either his wife Della, who is unfaithful to him, nor with ;
I
his sister Janey, who is embarrassed by his wild and
1 1 7
crude ways. His end is a crushed skull when he is hit
over the head with a bottle in an altercation over a
woman. Richard Ellsworth Savage, who shows literary
talent, studies at Harvard, works for an ambulance
service in Europe, and on his return to the United States |
joins J. Ward Morehouse's advertising agency. J
The two women whose careers are narrated in the !
second volume are Eveline Hutchins and Anne Elizabeth
Trent, whose narrative is entitled "Daughter."
Personally unfulfilled with her partnership with Eleanor
Stoddard, Eveline pursues a life marked by a succession
of illicit relationships in an intense desire to escape
boredom. She becomes pregnant and at the end of her
narrative tells the father Paul, "I want to have the
I
I
little brat, Paul, we have to go through everything j
together" (335). Paul responds with a half-hearted nod. J
The narrative "Daughter" is one of several in the trilogy
that draw attention to changing ethical values as the
younger generation finds the values of its parents
unacceptable. Coming from a financially comfortable
Texas family, Daughter, nonetheless, sides with the
oppressed when she defends a woman picketer against a
policeman. The ethical conflict between herself and her
family is such that she leaves the country, becomes
1 1 8
pregnant with Dick Savage, and later dies in an airplane
crash with a French aviator during a drunken spree.
The segment entitled "The Body of an American" ends
the second volume of the trilogy. The five-page unit,
with its variety of prose styles and bits of history that
together make up a life, serves as a scathing criticism
of the social environment in the United States that takes
no notice of the individual. Treatment of the individual
is similar to what is encountered in the army. John Doe,
as the American is referred to, is the Everyman of the
United States. To him is attributed all that is
representative of a cross-section of the country's
population. The details of his early years indicate as
much:
John Doe was born (thudding din of blood
in love into the shuddering soar of a man
and a woman alone indeed together lurching
into
and ninemonths sick drowse walking into
scared agony and the pain and blood and
mess of birth.) John Doe was born
and raised in Brooklyn, in Memphis, near
the lakefront in Cleveland, Ohio, in the
stench of the stockyards in Chi, on Beacon
Hill, in an old brick house in Alexandria,
Virginia, on Telegraph Hill, in a
halftimbered Tudor collage in Portland,
the city of roses
in the Lying-In Hospital old Morgan endowed
on Stuyvesant Square,
across the railroad tracks, out near the
country club, in a shack cabin tenement
1 1 9
apartmenthouse exclusive residential suburb;
. (463)
He died in combat while serving in the military. The
last mentioned fact of his life is that at his funeral,
"Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies" (467).
The Big Money concludes the trilogy, presenting
American history up to the 1929 Stock Market Crash. The
Biographies include accounts of the artists Isadora
Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, and Frank Lloyd Wright; the
inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Thomas Edison;
the newspaper publisher William Randolf Hearst; the
intellectual Thorsten Veblen; Henry Ford; and Frederick
Winslow Taylor, who "invented" the concept of efficiency
in manufacturing and whose Biography appears first. The
novel's title is ironic, as economic growth for some is
contrasted with political and economic oppression for
many.
The two major narratives in the third volume are
those of Charley Anderson and Mary French. A secondary
narrative is of Margo Dowling. Along with the narrative
of Morehouse, those of Charley Anderson and Margo Dowling
are of individuals who come from humble and impoverished
beginnings and achieve a level of success in their
careers. Charley becomes a wealthy airplane
manufacturer; Margo finds success as an actress.
However, the propserity they find in their public lives
1 2 0
has no equivalent in their personal lives. Charley's
wife shows little interest in his buisness ventures, and
he pursues relationships with other women, including
Margo Dowling. After a bought of drinking, Charley
Anderson is killed in an automobile accident. Although
Margo Dowling becomes an established actress, she is
unable to find any personal satifaction with her life.
In one description of her feelings about her life at a
time when she is temporarily separated from her current
love interest, her mental state is made very clear:
She spent the days reading magazines and
monkeying with her hair and manicuring
her fingernails and dreamingabout how she
could get out of this miserable sordid
life. Sordid was a word she'd just picked
up. It was in her mind all the time,
sordid, sordid, sordid. (279)
At his deathbed, Charley Anderson gives Margo enough money
for her to go to Hollywood, where she marries a successful
producer who makes her a famous movie star.
But the narrative of Mary French is central to the
trilogy as well as to its last volume. Mary French is a
woman of conscience and social responsibility. She has
inherited these finer qualities from her physician father
who serves the poor without consideration for their
ability to pay. Her mother, on the otherr hand, resents
the generosity of her husband, for this deprives her of
participation in the social arena she values. The
1 2 1
following description of the family illustrates the
conflict of values Mary confronts:
Mealtimes it was worse. They never seemed
to get settled at the table for a meal,
the three of them, without that awful
phone ringing. Daddy would go and Mary
and Mother would sit there finishing the
meal alone, sitting there without saying
anything . . . . Then Mother would put
away the dishes and clatter around the
house muttering to herself that if poor
Daddy ever took half the trouble with
his paying patients that he did with
those miserable foreigners and miners he
would be a rich man today and she wouldn't
be killing herself with housework. Mary
hated to hear Mother talk against Daddy
the way she did. (124)
Mary befriends Ada Cohn, despite her mother's protests
against Mary associating with a Jew, and the two decide
to major in sociology in college and to become
socialworkers (129).
Mary's dedication leads her to work at Jane Addam's
Hull House, to work as a union organizer in New York
City, and to work with the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense
Committee. In the entire trilogy, she alone maintains
her sense of social reponsibility. The last of the
narratives in the trilogy is of her, and to the end she
continues to express concern for the less fortunate
despite the self-serving interests of those who are
members of the Communist Party and who supposedly speak
on behalf of the suffering and downtodden. At one point
she expresses her sense of outrage at injustice this way:
1 2 2
"It's the waste," Mary cried out savagely,
suddenly able to articulate. Ada and
George Barrow were helping her into the cab.
"The food they waste and the money they
waste while our peole starve in tarpaper
barracks."
"The contraditions of capitalism," said
George Barrow with a knowing leer. "How
about a bite to eat?" (551)
Mary's last action is to leave hurriedly for Pennsylvania
for a protest that has to be organized (553).
The trilogy ends with the final segment, "Vag." Again,
the Everyman of America is seen wandering on the open
highway, destitute, while above him in a "silver Douglas"
passengers sit pretty, big men with bankaccounts, highly
paid jobs, who are saluted by doormen; telephone girls say
goodmorning to them" (555). The contrast between the haves
and have-nots is re-affirmed in this segment, and the trip
made by the Douglas airliner traverses the entire breadth
of the continent. In fact, Dos Passos here evokes the
nation' westward expansion, as he names major cities that
form a line from East to West, from Newark to Los Angeles.
Still,
The young man waits on the side of the
road; the plane has gone; thumb moves in
a small arc when a car tears hissing past.
Eyes seek the driver's eyes. A hundred
miles down the road. Head swims, belly
tightens, wants crawl over his skin like
ants:
went to school, books said opportunity,
ads promised speed, own your home, shine
bigger than your neighbor, the radiocrooner
whispered girls, ghosts of platinum girls
coaxed from the screen, millions in
winnings were chalked up on the boards in
the offices, paychecks were for hands
willing to work, the cleared desk of an
executive with three telephones on it;
waits with swimming head, needs knot the
belly, idle hands numb, beside the
speeding traffic.
A hundred miles down the road. (555-6)
In the trilogy's final point, Dos Passos re-states his
criticism of America's lost values. What used to be true
promises for economic freedom and success have now become
hollow and deceptive.
In Dos Passos' four major novels, one finds a literary
radical, an intellectual radical, and a political radical.
And it is these three qualities that made Dos Passos' major
fiction generate much interest in Latin America. As the
discussion of Fuentes and ideology will begin to suggest,
Dos Passos, in his life and major work, shares many of the
cultural values that determine the position of the
writer/intellectual in Latin America.
1 2 4
CHAPTER I V
A REVOLUTIONARY FORM FOR A REVOLUTIONARY
VIEW: IDEOLOGY AND CARLOS FUENTES
La region mas transparente f Fuentes' first novel,
published in 1958 and translated into English in 1960,
marks the moment when a number of literary and cultural
factors consolidate to bring about a major turning point
in the history of the Mexican novel, one moment that is
also part of the history of the Latin American novel. j
This turning point has remained a dominant element in all j
i
of Fuentes' novels. This is especially the case in
Fuentes' city novels, starting with La region mas
transparente. through Cambio de piel (Change of Skin^, a
middle work published in 1967, to his eleventh novel,
Cristbbal Nonato. published in 1987 and translated into
English in 1989 as Christopher Unborn.
What comes together in Fuentes' novels reflects
ideological imperatives directing the literary activity
of a Latin American writer from Mexico. Key among these
is the culturally determined ideology of the social and
political obligations placed on literary processes. This
is felt by writers throughout Latin America. Second, as
a Mexican novelist in the second half of the twentieth
century, Fuentes inherited the tradition of literary
1 2 5
realism established by the two major novelists of the
Mexican Revolution, Mariano Azuela and Martin Luis
Guzman. In addition to the techniques of literary
realism, Fuentes also inherited the Mexican novel's
attention to history, especially the aftermath of the
Mexican Revolution, which brought about the country's
need to establish a firm cultural identity, one based on
a distinct voice that is clearly of the mestizaie.
Fuentes, in turn, brought to the Mexican novel a modern
consciousness shaped by extensive travel abroad and by
contact with the major works of the European, Russian,
and American novelistic traditions, and by his
participation in international politics as diplomat and
ambassador from Mexico.
Fuentes' novels help form a new chapter in the
history of the Mexican novel by bringing the techniques
of modern narrative to the cultural and historical
traditions of Mexico. As a consequence, Fuentes propels
the Mexican novel, and in the process the Latin American
novel as well, into the modern phase of universalization,
the construction of a novel that in form and content
provided an opportunity for the Mexican experience to be
detailed in universal terms while still maintaining its
unique cultural identity. In his political and literary
essays, through numerous interviews given in English and
1 2 6
in Spanish, and, of course, in his novels, Carlos Fuentes
has articulated and illustrated the social, political,
intellectual, and literary context that define his
standing as writer and intellectual (synonymous in Latin
America) within Mexican political and literary history.
The painful history and equally painful legacy of
European colonialism, the bitter struggles for
independence, the recurring rise of military
dictatorships and coups, insurrection, revolution,
post-colonial European and American intervention, the
mixture of races and cultures with their religions and
languages, and different time periods existing
simultaneously have all contributed to the ideology that
determines the various cultural components for each Latin
American country. Within the ideology of Latin America
is the social obligation writers in Latin America
experience as part of their literary work. Both Carlos
Fuentes and his contemporary Mario Vargas Llosa have
commented on this issue and how it in fact functions in
Latin American writing.
What these two Latin American novelists stress in
their descriptions of the writer in Latin America is the
social and historical conditions that have forged the
development of this role for the writer. As Emir
Rodriguez Monegal has stated, cultural and historical
127
conditions peculiar to Latin America have contributed to
the fusion of aesthetic and political realities within
literary texts, including the novel. Mario Vargas Llosa J
I
J stipulates a number of key conditions that have, as a
consequence, elevated the writer to the role of speaker
f
for the voiceless, of one who consciously gives i
t
expression to what has been kept silent. In answering
the question of how it is that the writer should have
such an obligation placed upon the writer by the writer's
culture and the writer's time, Vargas Llosa provides the
following explanation:
The answer lies in the social conditions of I
Latin America, the problems which face our
countries. All countries have problems,
of course, but in many parts of Latin j
America, both in the past and in the
present, the problems which constitute '
the closest daily reality for people are [
not freely discussed and analyzed in |
public, but are usually denied and
silenced. There are no means through j
which those problems can be presented and
denounced, because the social and
political establishment exercises a
strict censorship of the media and over
all the communications systems. <
("Social" 6) i
Within these conditions, it is no wonder that for Vargas j
i
Llosa social commitment is a "moral imposition" ("Social"
6). Given the absence of individual expression that is a
part of life in Latin America, as Vargas Llosa says, art
i
has taken on a distinct function in Latin America. And
in fulfilling that function, literary texts employ
128
techniques that can provide the needed basis for
articulating a previous "silence."
In continuing his comments on the social commitment
of writers in Latin America he describes both the
function and technique that have come to be dominant
characteristics of art in Latin America:
Even during the colonial period .
all over Latin America novels, poems and
plays were— as Stendhal once said he
wanted the novel to be— the mirrors in
which Latin Americans could truly see
their faces and examine their sufferings.
What was, for political reasons, repressed
or distorted in the press and in the
schools and universities, all the evils
that were buried by the military and
economic elite which ruled the countries,
the evils which were never mentioned in
the speeches or the politicians nor taught
in the lecture halls nor criticized in the
congresses nor discussed in magazines
found a vehicle of expression in
literature.
So, something curious and paradoxical
occurred. The realm of the imagination
became in Latin America the kingdom of
objective reality; fiction became a
substitute for social science; our best
teachers about reality were the dreamers,
the literary artists. And this is true
not only for our great essayists .
whose books are indispensable for a
thorough comprehension of the historical
and social reality of their respective
countries, but it is also valid for the
writer who only practiced the creative
literary genres: fiction, poetry and
drama. ("Social" 7)
What constitutes the political for the Latin American
writer is not the national issues of leadership and type
129
of governance, but Latin American history as lived, which
means the essential concerns of daily life and the
sufferings endured by individuals living under political
and economic oppression. Vargas Llosa concludes this
description by stressing that with these imperatives
stimulating the creation of literary works, the situation
for the writer is such that writing "confers on the
writer, as a citizen, a kind of moral and spiritual
leadership" ("Social" 8).
This culturally specific prescribed role assigned to
the Latin American writer through Latin America's
cultural ideology has identified certain literary |
i
techniques for the fulfillment of the writer's specific j
role. Vargas Llosa describes the fantastic as one of j
I
these techniques that help the novelist meet the j
ideological demands placed on the novelist's work: |
I
But in Latin America (mostly in modern
times but also in the past) fantastic
literature also has its roots in
objective reality and is a vehicle for
exposing social and political evils. So,
fantastic literature becomes, in this
way, symbolical literature in which,
disguised with the prestigious clothes
of dreams and unreal beings and facts,
we recognize the characters and problems
of contemporary life. ("Social" 13)
The fantastic elements Vargas Llosa refers to here
constitute what other observers have called the "mythic
vision" in the modern Latin American novel, and also the
I
130 j
»
fusion of poetry and history, which distinguishes the
Latin American narrative from its North American and
European contemporaries. What Vargas Llosa describes
here is the language of the dream, the language of
i
Caliban, by which Caliban can oppose the rationalisms of ;
Prosper© (Kroller 120). ]
I
Vargas Llosa's comments on literature, the role of
the writer, and the use of fantastic elements in fiction j
are reaffirmed by Fuentes. He, too, acknowledges the I
i
impact the political and cultural realities of Latin
America have had on writing and the writer.
i
1
In an interview for Studies on the Left. Fuentes j
comments on the historical forces that have motivated such [
I
an emphasis on social and political conditions in the Latin !
I
American novel:
A writer lives in a given society, and he
responds to this society. Now, in the
case of Latin America his responsibility
is clear. In other more socially and 1
culturally developed countries it is i
possible that the writer may devote !
himself strictly to his creative work. j
In our countries, however, this is very |
difficult. The creative writer feels an j
obligation, a responsibility to wield a i
double sword: the literary and the j
political. He feels he has to give |
voice to the voiceless. Our countries j
generally do not have labor unions; the
voiceless do not have political parties. |
The situation of the newspapers in Latin
America . . . is deplorable. They are
rightist newspapers controlled by foreign
influences, by mercantile influences. I
They do not give a voice to the people,
131
so the creative writer is Latin America
feels the urge and responsibility to
speak out not only for himself as a
creative writer, but for the millions
who do not have a voice in his country.
I think that the creative writer should
be creative when he is a writer, when he
is a novelist or poet, and should be
political when he is a political writer.
The point is not to mix the two things.
One approach is that of the creative
writer, who cannot be sectarian, or
abstract, or dogmatic; and another is
the approach of the political writer who
is defending a cause. One must not
confuse these two things; one must be
able to give both of these professions
their due. (49-50)
Fuentes makes a number of revealing comments here,
especially those that help distinguish between the
aesthetic and political in Latin American writing. The
aesthetic devotes itself exclusively to the creation of
art separated from the issues of existence. But Fuentes
locates the political in the voice of the people, in the
need and the opportunity for individuals to express and
discuss what effects them directly. Literary works
fulfill the need and provide the opportunity for such
expression, as they function as substitutes for
responsible and open journalism, becoming the main social
mechanism for the expression of ideas and opinions.
Novels, as a consequence, reflect the daily life in Latin
American countries.
Fuentes further elaborates on the distinction between
the aesthetic and the political and makes a significant
132
clarification about what in fact constitutes political
considerations within artistic works. He states that in
his own novels he incorporates the political not in terms
of movements, ideologies, historical figures or events,
but, as he says, "as human life I I mean I hope it is
incarnated in people, in the true lives of people, in a
creative way" (49). Fuentes draws a significant
distinction here, one that clarifies the relationship
between Fuentes7 fiction and his nonfiction. What he is
saying is that the novel7s domain is primarily of the
aesthetic as it endeavors to represent artistically the
i
political realities of everyday life. The explicitly j
political, the "defending of a cause" as he says, is J
reserved, apparently, for the non-creative genres, the
nonfiction prose forms of the essay, the polemic, the
critique, and the historical chronicle. Fiction and
nonfiction are two sides of the same coin: each
contributes to the articulation of a "silence," but the
"voice" is created through different literary means.
Fuentes also describes the new literary form demanded
by a revolutionary view of society:
In addition, there is this point that one
should consider: if you have a
revolutionary view of society, you also
have to have a revolutionary form to
express it. I think this has been the
great failure of literature in Soviet
Russia and in the socialist countries.
They have tried to give a revolutionary
133
view of society through outmoded
Victorian forms of literature. (50)
Fuentes' view on the need for a revolutionary form to
convey a revolutionary view of society sheds light on
Fuentes7 own aesthetic. One of his intentions in the
writing of La region mas transparente, as he told
Emmanuel Carballo, was to bring to the novel in Mexico
those techniques that could accommodate the modern
realities of twentieth-century Mexico.
The mirror analogy used by Vargas Llosa to describe
the social relationship literature has in Latin America
is one that Fuentes also uses to talk about his novels
and the Mexican Revolution. He describes the Mexican
Revolution of 1910-1914 as the time in Mexico when the
Mexican people experienced the opportunity to see
themselves and to know of themselves:
What the Mexican Revolution did through
this incredible turmoil, an unleashing
of energy, and acts of self-recognition
during a period of ten years was to say
"We are all that we have been in the past.
We are Aztec, we are Spaniards. . . ."
In the Revolution, Mexico is a country
that bursts out of its isolation, of its
traditional isolation in small pockets,
valleys, deserts, mountains. The movement
impressed upon the country by the great
marches and cavalry charges coming all the
way from the northern frontier with Obregon
and the Yaqui Indians from Sonora, and
with Pancho Villa from Chihuahua, and
Zapata coming from the South with his
agrarian guerrillas and their meeting was
the first time in which Mexicans finally
met each other and discovered how other
134
Mexicans spoke, how other Mexicans sang,
how other Mexicans made love, and how
other Mexicans dreamed, and ate. It was
a supreme act of self-recognition.
("Revolution")
Fuentes' novels stress this understanding within Mexican
national consciousness of the Revolution as an experience
of cultural self-identity.
Fuentes uses a ballroom of mirrors in the Miranda
hacienda for the poignant scene of self-recognition in
Old Gringor Fuentes' novel of Ambrose Bierce and the
Mexican Revolution. Fuentes describes the revolutionary
army's reaction to seeing themselves reflected in the
great wall of mirrors with the following passage:
The men and women of Arroyo's troops were
looking at themselves. Paralyzed by their
own images, by the full-length reflection
of their being, by the wholeness of their
bodies. They turned slowly, as if to make
sure this was not just another illusion.
They were caught in the labyrinth of
mirrors ....
One of Arroyo's soldiers held an arm
toward the mirror. "Look, it's you."
And his companion pointed toward the
reflection in the other mirror. "It's
me."
"It's us." I
I
1
The words made the rounds— it's us, it's I
us— followed by the sound of a guitar
joined by many voices, and the cavalry
troops came in, and once again there was j
entertainment and dancing and gaiety— ;
indifferent to the presence of the two j
gringos— in the hacienda of the
Mirandas. (39-40)
135
This looking at oneself is what, as Vargas Llosa and
Fuentes suggest, the novel accomplishes in Latin America
for Latin Americans.
The Mexican Revolution, especially the years 1910 to
1917, is the major historical moment for Mexico in the
twentieth century. The revolution marked a turning point
in the country's development that continues to wield
enormous psychological and political consequences.
Within the literary history of the country, the Mexican
Revolution, too, has continued to remain a key issue. |
Since the realistic treatment of the Revolution in the
novels of Mariano Azuela and Martin Luis Guzman, Mexican
novelists are still dealing with the political, economic,
and psychological aftermath of the Revolution. '
I
J As his comments make very clear, Carlos Fuentes sees
J the historical significance of the Revolution as the j
moment in Mexican history when Mexicans from all the
country's regions were able to see one another, to know
themselves in one another. In the act of taking up arms,
i
the armies of the Revolution effected major changes in j
the social, political, and economic conditions of the 1
country. The Revolution made it possible for Mexico to I
"accept its mestizaie as a valid foundation upon which to j
build its own culture" (deGuzman 23). !
136
The Revolution is the culmination of Mexico's history
of European colonization. The cultural hybridity
resulting from the imposition of a European ideology upon
established indigenous ideologies begun with the Spanish
invasion and conquest resulted in Ha tremendous cultural
confusion that could not even begin to be conceived of as
resolvable until at least political independence was
achieved" (deGuzman 24). However, after independence
from Spain, Mexico's political foundation was mired in an
unyielding criollismo that sought to maintain European
culture as the dominant culture of the new nation
(deGuzman 26). But the facts of Mexico's population,
which at this time was about 70% to 75% mestizo, signaled
the need for a realignment of both political and cultural
dominance, such that the dominant culture would be a true
fusion of Mexico's two "principal cultural heritages"
(deGuzman 27). The Revolution of 1910 was the catalyst
that brought about a new Mexican culture based on the
mestizaie. And the assertion of this new Mexican culture
within the arena of modern world politics occurred during
the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (deGuzman 28).
Emerging with the new national identity was a new
Mexican and a new national psychology of independence.
As deGuzmdn states, "a new national prototype" emerged
precisely in the generation to which
Carlos Fuentes belongs. He, just as
137
much as any other Mexican of his time,
is a result of this new mestizo culture,
which had its gestation during the
centuries between Cortes and [Porfirio]
Diaz, and which officially came of age
under Cardenas in 1938. This is the
generation whose members have reached
maturity in the new Mexico, and one need
only look at them and their work to
realize that they are quite different
from their predecessors, even from
their own parents— newer, stronger,
surer of themselves. Mexicans at last.
(deGuzman 29)
In Carlos Fuentes and those of his generation, the two
cultures of Indian and Spanish are in "counterbalance and
not in conflict" (deGuzman 31).
The Cdrdenas Presidency contributed much to the
development of the new Mexican mestizo. His presidency,
in its six years from 1934 to 1940, did more to
"implement the goals of the Revolution than any other man
since Madero" (deGuzman 30). Cardenas attempted to
effect two major changes in the nation's direction. He,
first of all, sought "to reestablish the ideals and
aspirations of the Revolution" which had been lost under
the Calles Presidency. Second, his efforts found a
sympathetic response from the Roosevelt administration in
the United States. The most significant step, however,
for the country was the expropriation under Cardenas of
Mexico's oil industries in March of 1938 (deGuzman 30).
With this action, Cdrdenas declared an economic
independence that resulted from Mexico's mestizaie and
its newly found psychological independence.
It is against this political, economic, and
psychological background that Carlos Fuentes and his
generation have been proclaiming Mexico's new national
identity of the mestizaie:
the mestizo, instead of accepting any
longer that denigration which European
culture had imposed upon him, now
accepted the fact of being mestizo without
feeling inferior about it. . . . he
could dedicate himself to developing his
own life and his own culture in his own
eclectic way. (deGuzman 31)
Mexico's new identity in the mestizaie is what Carlos
Fuentes articulates in his novels. Part of the process
of giving narrative form to the modern post-Revolution
experience of the mestizo is to use freely and
simultaneously to resist European and Anglo-American
models. To assert a cultural difference between the
voice of the mestizo and the voices of Europe and the
United States is, in fact, consistent with the attitude
of the new Mexican.
To articulate its new cultural identity, to make that
identity known to the new Mexicans and to the rest of the
modern world Mexico would need a new language. Such a
language is what Fuentes describes in La nueva novela
hispanoamericana. published in 1969. La nueva novela
hispanoamericana is a broad critical analysis of the new
139
novel in Spanish America. After a brief overview of the
geographical and historical issues that have contributed
in the past to the Spanish American novel, Fuentes
describes the kind of language modern Spanish America,
including Mexico, demands and that Spanish American
writers are now creating. He states in the section "Un
nuevo lenguaje" ("A New Language") that the new Spanish
American writer undertakes a difficult task, which
specifically is "la elaboracion critica de todo lo no
dicho en nuestra larga historia de mentiras, silencios,
retoricas y complicidades academicas. Inventar un
lenguaje es decir todo lo que la historia ha callado”
(30; "the critical elaboration of all that has not been
said in our long history of lies, silences, rhetoric, and
academic complicities. Inventing a language means to
state all that our history has kept quiet.").
Fuentes locates the vitality and soundness of this
new language of the new Spanish American novel in its
verbal experimentation and its humor. Fuentes cites
Paradiso by Lezama Lima and Rayuela by Cortazar as
outstanding examples of unique prose forms (30). Humor
in the Spanish American novel is one of the notable acts
in the creation of a truly Latin American language. "Por
primera vez," Fuentes states, "nuestros libros saben
reir" (30; "For the first time, our books know how to
140
laugh."). Among those whose works testify to this
welcomed flourish in the new novel are Manuel Puig's La
traicion de Rita Hayworth, with its parody; Jose
Agustln's De perfil. with its picaresque; and Gustavo
Sainz' Gazapo f with its sentimental irony. For Fuentes,
the new language derives its potential to give voice to
what has been kept silent from its ability to counteract
the false and anachronistic language of Mexico's feudal
political foundation as a Spanish colony (31). Fuentes
completes his discussion by devoting individual sections
to Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Julio Cortazar, and Juan Goytisolo.
For Carlos Fuentes specifically, the new language of
the Latin American novel surfaces as a fusion between the
narratives of history and myth. While this combination
may be viewed as a technical element of Fuentes' fiction,
it is, according to Luis Leal, a way of providing a new
perspective toward, a new understanding of, history
("History" 3). The two modes of history and myth are
distinct ways of describing the human condition or
cultural reality. Citing Northrp Frye, Leal defines the
historical (realistic) as "the art of verisimilitude, the
art of implied similarity" and the mythic as "the art of
implied metaphorical identity" (4).
141
Fuentes combined these modes in part as a reaction
against the novelistic tradition he inherited. By the
late nineteenth century, the realistic-naturalistic mode
of the novel had "degenerated into a documentary
narrative" (Leal 4). The novel had now become merely
historical documentation— accurate recording— and had
forsaken aesthetic imperatives. The novelists of this
tradition, in other words, "were more interested in
giving historical facts than in creating reliable
characters through whom they could present an artistic
view of society" (Leal 4). The Spanish American
realistic novel, in particular, had come to place an
over-reliance "upon documenting the social life and
describing the physical environment rather than
presenting an integrated vision of that society" (Leal
4).
The novel of the Mexican Revolution offers a partial
break from the earlier tradition. Fuentes finds here
"ambiguity in characterization" even though there still
remains a dependence on documentary style (Leal 4). It
is through Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo that Fuentes
encounters the introduction of myth— "the thread that
leads to the new Spanish American novel" (Leal 5).
Fuentes' own works, Leal points out, stem from this
thread,
142
which for the first time in Mexican
letters mark the creation of a fiction
that gives a mythified vision of history
without sacrificing the aesthetic elements
so essential to the new novel, [while]
utilizing the most recent techniques of
fiction writing. (Leal 5)
His novels illustrate a new realism, not a realism "that
was expressed by psychological introspection or by the
illustration of class relation," but one "based on the
utilization of mythical structures and themes" (Leal 5).
The fusion of history and myth— the new language of
the modern Latin American novel— is the language, within
Fuentes' novels, of the modern Mexican mestizo and
Mexico's modern mestizo culture. With this language,
Fuentes articulates the silences that have plagued Mexico
in its social and literary past, gives voice to the
ancient Indian consciousness that has been denied, and
critically delineates Mexican society after the
Revolution. In a word, Fuentes achieves what he had
earlier learned: "that Spanish could be the language of
free men" ("How" 9).
La recridn mas transparente transcends the boundaries
of time and space through its representation of modern
Mexico City and modern Mexican culture. The novel is
structured through a series of vignettes that are
indicated by either a character's name or an image, and
the entire narrative is framed by a prologue and final
143
segment, which places the novel within an historical
context encompassing the entire history of Mexico, from
the ancient Aztec and Maya to modern times. The
untitled, single-paragraph prologue is a soliloquy by
Ixca Cienfuegos, who represents and articulates "a
collective past" (Faris Carlos 31), that evokes the Aztec
past through the "Spirit of Anahuac, who does not crush
grapes but hearts, who drinks no earthly balm" (3) and
the painful realities of Mexico City:
Fall with me on our moon-scar city, city
scratched by sewers, crystal city of vapor
and alkali frost, city witness to all we
forget, city of carnivorous wall, city of
motionless pain, city of immense brevities,
city of fixed sun, ashing city of slow
fire, city to its neck in water, city of
merry lethargy, city of twisted stinks,
city rigid between air and worms, city
ancient in light, old city cradled among
birds of omen, city new upon sculptured
dust, city in the true image of gigantic
heaven, city of dark varnish and cut
stone, city beneath glistening mud, city
of entrails and tendons, city of the
violated outrage, city of resigned market
plazas, city of anxious failures, city
tempested by domes, city woven by
amnesias, bitch city, hungry city,
sumptuous villa, leper city. Incandescent
prickly pear. Eagle without wings.
Here we abide. And what are we going
to do about it? Where the air is clear.
(5)
The prologue sets the critical tone of the novel: Mexico
City is evoked with an aura of ambivalence. The city is
to be vilified for its lost glories as well as remembered J
for its past glories.
144
Within the environment of this city, the narratives
of the characters proceed, with Ixca Cienfuegos, as the
i
central consciousness of the novel, structurally holding
them together, much like the city and the Mexican past
themselves do. Ixca Cienfuegos, whose name is a
i
combination of Nahuatl and Spanish — the first name is
Aztec for "to roast," and the second means "a hundred
fires"— along with his mother, Teodula Moctezuma, serve I
i
as the "ancient voices" for the city. Cienfuegos, in i
addition, as he encounters character after character,
generates their confessional self-revelations.
The characters, their lives, and their encounters ;
with each other provide a sense of the social and
economic realities of modern Mexico city. They are a \
representative cross-section of the city's urban !
landscape, and come from all social levels.
Business interests and the rise of the bourgeoisie
are revealed through the lives of Federico Robles, who j
had fought in the Revolution but who is now consumed with ;
I
only business matters, and Roberto Regules, who is
motivated by the desire to take advantage of any business
opportunity. Another connected to the Revolution is
i
Rodrigo Pola, whose father, Gervasio Pola, had been
executed during the Revolution. Another writer, Manuel i
i
i
Zamacona, is identified as a poet. Pimpinela de Ovando
145
represents Mexico's old aristocracy. Feliciano Sanchez
is a labor leader; Jaime Ceballos is a law student; Beto
is a hood; Juan Morales is a taxi driver; and Gabriel is
an undocumented laborer who goes to the United States.
Within the city is also Bob6 Gutierrez and his decadent
social group, corrupted but fashionable.
Federico Robles is born into a peasant family, fights
in the Revolution without understanding its meaning, and
gains money and status as a banker. He comes to
represent one who has turned away from his mestizo
origins. His skin is described at one point in the novel
as "Indian color, the Indian so carefully disguised by
cashmere and cologne" (88). He marries the status
seeking Norma Larragoiti, who has green eyes, the sign of
strong European blood— not mestizo mixed blood. Their
marriage is one dedicated to the enhancement of their
individual social standing:
But he loved her as such a person: she was
what he had wanted and searched for: the
counterpart to his public being, the
continuation and spreading of the streams
of his triumph, a fellow comrade in the
true revolution. He fixed his eyes on her
reflection again. Across it danced a
rosary of cocktail parties and weddings
and dinners where she was respected
because she was the wife of Federico
Robles, accepted because she was the wife
of Federico Robles, a man who had
triumphed and was wealthy and Norma was
consequently elegance and chic and all
that. And he like her as that; he
believed, he was thinking now, that he
146
had searched for her to be exactly that.
And nothing else. He had no right to
demand more of her, or other of her.
She had fulfilled their tacit bargain. (125)
Federico is able to find personal happiness only with his
lover, Hortensia Chacon, who is blind and mestiza.
Although Robles suffers an economic downfall at the end,
he finds personal rewards with Hortensia. His financial
decline is offset by a deepened sense of personal
fulfillment.
The decline of the aristocracy and the financial and
political rise of the bourgeoisie— epitomized in Federico
and Norma Robles— is conveyed in the sustained contempt
that the aristocratic Ovando family feels toward the
Robles. During a visit to her Aunt Lorenza, Pimpinela
tells her to invite Norma to dinner for the sake of
cousin Benjamin:
But look . . . pardon, pardon .
you are going to invite Norma Larragoiti
to dinner. She's the wife of the banker
Federico Robles. She's an upstart,
obnoxious, vulgar, a classic anything you
care to call her, and Robles is a savage
from God knows what jungle. But Norma
melts at the mention of an old name, and
dinner here, among your mementos, will
put her out of her mind ....
Dona Lorenza's protests were useless.
Norma Larragoiti! Daughter of some
sheepherder! Nevertheless, I will have
to show her what it means to be what we
are, and surrounded by this genteel
poverty, make her feel that she favors
us by visiting us.
147
It simply was not possible. Dona Lorenza
felt a final passing away when Norma,
radiant, wrapped in mink and playing
carelessly with her pearls, visibly
affirmed the sense of security in this
new world, of freedom and belonging, which
had used to be their own feeling. The
pedestal which for forty years Dona Lorenza
had believed was vacant, waiting for their
return, turned out to be occupied .
by vulgarity, on that the old woman
insisted, by an upstart vulgarity without
the least trace of sweet graciousness. (70)
Later, the history of the aristocracy is revealed by
Pimpinela:
"I remember my grandmother said that just
as the Porfirian aristocracy were horror-
struck when Villa and Zapata marched into
Mexico city, so she and the old families
were horror-struck when Diaz marched in a i
century ago. In those days ladies and ■
gentlemen were all Lardists even though
they, too, had become ladies and gentlemen
by stealing church properties. (127)
The legacy of corruption has continued to remain a part j
I
of Mexico's history.
Another legacy, that of poverty, is also experienced j
in modern Mexico City. Gabriel's return from the United
States and his arrival to his family's home take him
I
through the poor section of the city. Even though he j
returns with money in his pocket from working in the !
fields in Texas and California, the poverty around him is
a painful reminder:
Gabriel set off, walking along the street,
smelling the pungent odors of brown I
bodies, looking at his new reflection, ;
crew-cut, prosperous, in the show windows ,
148
of shoe stores. The city towered over
him, crowded down on him as if there were
no sky. He came back from California's
open fields to breathe tomato skins.
"Taxi!" Straight streets, cluttered with
trash, and now low peeling houses. He
amused himself reading the signs over
bar doors, over the doors of funeral
parlors, clustered along Transito, white
store fronts, and outside, on display,
always a white-enameled child's coffin.
He could smell the dead stiff blood of a
child behind every door; in his own home
four had died, too young, before they had
done anything, neither work nor fuck, nor
anything important in life.
Gabriel snapped his fingers with impatience.
A wad of dollars in his pocket, shinning
presents, so they could all live better.
It was his first year, and he had brought
back everything he could carry, legal or
contraband, risking bullets and drowning
when he crossed the Rio. Well, it was
that or push an ice cream cart along the
streets of Mexico City. (31)
Gabriel brings back an electric blender for this family,
but he forgets that the family has no electricity.
This description of the city is only one of several
that appear throughout the novel. The city that is now
the center of bourgeois business interests is described
with the following passage:
Eleven in the morning. Cars roared by on
Insurgentes, on Niza where mansions from
the epoch of Porfirio Diaz had begun the
quick decline toward pharmacies, beauty
parlors, shops. The sun beat down. No
breeze stirred Reforma's graceful tree
crowns. From the ninth floor of a rose-
stone building which soared between two
melancholy mansard roofs, Federico Robles
stared over the unsteady city's pastiche.
Vaporous glass facades showed him their
149
back sides of painted brick and beer
advertisements. In the distance, at the
foot of the mountains, a whirlwind of dust
collected its brown atoms. Here, near,
laborers blasting, air-drilling a street
away. Wreathes of secretaries and paunchy
sidewalk vendors and skirt-watchers wove
among files of beggars and elderly gringos j
in open shirts who told stories about
Kansas City to other elderly gringos who
told stories about Peoria. They ran,
watching their watches, brave men dressed
in gray, tattered brief cases under their
arms. . . . Robles liked to lean out i
his window and smell the flea circus |
hopping below without being bitten by
all the necessary nobodies and all the
nonentity weavers of life who passed j
oblivious to skyscrapers and to Federico |
Robles. Two worlds: clouds and excrement. j
Encased in glass, isolated, privileged, he
always traveled from his colonial-style
home, grill-windowed, the entrance spumy :
with meringue stonework, to his auto, from I
his auto to the iron and nickel elevator j
to the great window and the leather chairs;
and just by touching a button, he could !
reverse the trajectory. (39-41)
1
I
The emphasis in this passage is clearly the bourgeois
perspective of Robles; he sees only the materiality of
what for him is present-day Mexico City.
But the novel also stresses, through Ixca Cienfuegos,
the spirituality of the city. In a conversation with |
Rodrigo Pola, Cienfuegos points out to the distraught ^
i
writer the mystery that is still Mexico City: j
i
"Look at Norma's husband. He's balanced,
directed, he knows what he wants. He is
convinced that he is serving the good of
the country. Would it be enough to do
what he does, feeling as he feels? My God, i
Ixca, what is this country, where is it j
going, what can be done with it?" ;
150
"Everything." j
"Everything, but what? What do we have to J
do to understand it? Where does it begin, I
where does it end? Why is it satisfied ,
with half solutions? Why does it abandon
its best? What formula makes it
intelligible? Where can you grip it?
What happened to the Revolution? Did it
serve only to create a new group of
potentates, sure that they control
everything, that they are just as
indispensible as Diaz's clique believed |
themselves?
i
"Nothing is indispensible in Mexico,
Rodrigo. Late or soon, an anonymous and
secret force floods and transforms
everything. A force that is older than
all our memories; as compact and
concentrated as gunpowder. The
beginning, the origin. All the rest is 1
masquerade. There, in our origin, Mexico
still exists, is what is, is never what
it can be but what it is. And what Mexico
is, is fixed forever, incapable of
evolution. Mother stone cannot be !
shifted. Any sort of slime may grow on
that stone. But the stone doesn't
change, it is the same forever." (102)
What Ixca Cienfuegos describes here and gives to Rodrigo
Pola is the solid foundation of Mexico's ancient past and
1
basis for all that Mexico is. That spirit of the past I
i
has not been lost inspite of the overwhelming weight of
the modern landscape.
Indeed, at the end of the novel where the air is
clear— Mexico City— becomes the center of Mexico's past.
The content of Mexico's collective memory— a catalogue of
its history— is voiced through Ixca Cienfuegos, who, with .
1
the prostitute Gladys Garcia, remain untouched by the j
151
ancient sacrifices of human life that are still a part of
modern Mexican society.
Fuentes' fifth novel, A Change of Skin, appeared nine
years after La region mas transparente and illustrates a
number of structural and narrative strategies, along with
conceptual elements, established in the first novel.
Specifically, in A Change of Skin time is experienced as
multiple levels. While the time of the plot is only one
24-hour day, the text of the novel, through flashback,
memory, history, and juxtaposition traverses multiple
periods of time in the lives of the characters and in
Mexican history. The central action of the novel, the
arrival and stay in the Mexican city of Cholula, occurs
in what was once an Aztec ceremonial site dedicated to
the god Quetzalcoatl. The location evokes the play
within the lives of the characters of the ancient myths
and beliefs associated with the god of opposites, which
are also the central beliefs of Aztec religion and
philosophy. There is also a central narrator, Freddy
Lambert, who meets up with the four main characters in
Cholula with his group of hippie-like Monks. As
narrator, Freddy Lambert shifts back and forth from
second person— he addresses Elizabeth as "Dragoness"— to
third person narration.
152
The four main characters are made up of two couples.
The first couple is Javier and Elizabeth. He is a writer
and teacher who has yet to make his literary mark; she is ;
I
his wife of many years. The other couple is Franz and
Isabel. He is a friend of Javier and Elizabeth, an j
i
architect, an emigre to Mexico from Czechoslovakia, and
had assisted in the construction of the Nazi
concentration camp at Theresienstadt. Isabel, whose name
is Spanish for Elizabeth, was once a student of Javier's, i
I
but is now Franz's mistress and Javier's occasional
lover. As both the names and the relationships of the I
characters would suggest, opposites and dualities are
important conceptual elements in the novel. This
emphasis on opposites appears at various points in the |
i
narrative and not just in the details of the characters
j
inter-relationships.
The novel begins by detailing the two planes of
1
existence for the city of Cholula. The characters, as j
they first enter, see only one plane; but within the j
narrative, the second, ancient plane emerges. The first
section of the novel, which is less than twelve pages of
text, and entitled "An Impossible Feast," juxtaposes
these two planes. The entrance of the two couples into
I
Cholula is juxtaposed with the preparations Cortes and I
his Spanish soldiers are making for their attack on the i
153
ancient Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, and the entire history
of Mexico emerges. The perspective of the four is made
clear in the initial description of their stay in
Cholula:
When the four of you entered today all
you saw was the narrow filthy streets and
the packed houses that are all alike, all
of one story, all a blind wall with a too
wide door of cracking wood, all daubed
yellow and blue . . . But where,
Isabel, were the good citizens who live
behind those windows? Did they come out
to welcome you to town, or did they leave
that office to the dust and the filth,
the misery crowded around you, the
barefoot women with dark faces wrapped
in shawls, the heavy pregnant bellies,
the naked children, the packs of street
dogs. Packs of mongrels that drift
everywhere, go nowhere. Some yellow,
some black, all lost, listless,
strenghtless, hungry, scratching at their
infestations of sores and fleas, poking
along gutters for garbage scraps. Crippled,
emaciated, with the slanted red and yellow
eyes, dripping infection, that betray
their coyote ancestry, white-nosed, hair
worn off, bare hides splotched with scabs,
torpid and purposeless as they whine the
slow rhythm of this torpid purposeless
town that once upon a time was the
pantheon of an ancient Mexican world.
(3-4)
Mixed in between these descriptions are accounts of
Cortes's army in Cholula. The major cultural and
religious upheaval that this historical fact represents
is part of Cholula but goes unrecognized by the two
couples.
154
The four then encounter a morality play, recounting
the Fall and expulsion from Eden, in the church of San
Francisco that they enter. The two events— the Conquest
and the Fall— may suggest parallel losses of paradise and
innocence. However, they also brought about
duality— opposites. The Conquest brought about the
mestizo. who embodies a dual culture, Aztec and Spanish,
as well as the Fall, which represents sin and redemption,
the Christian cosmology of Good and Evil. In both, a
"change of skin” materializes, bring about a new cultural
being and a new metaphysics. The change to a new
existence is an additional conceptual element in the
novel.
The large middle section of the novel entitled "In
Body and Soul” presents scenes and events of the four
(
characters' past lives. Focusing on the past experiences
of Javier, Elizabeth, and Franz, the scenes in this
section recount the transformations (changes of skin)
that mark their pasts. Franz, for example, had already
experienced a series of changes before the events in
Cholula. The key incidents in his past include his
student days in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia,
participation in wartime activities as an architect for
the Nazis, and a love relationship with a Jewish girl,
who dies in a concentration camp. To escape persecution
155
after the war, Franz fakes his own death. With a new
name, he then flees to Mexico. The structure of this
section reenforces the concept of superimposed time: the
past is in the present. The inability of the characters
to see beyond the materiality (physical reality) of their
condition indicates that their time is the "time that
destroys you": they are doomed by time. Time for them
is a continuous series of changes without the promise of
redemption.
The four visit the ancient pyramid in Cholula in the
last section, "Visit Our Cellars." The entrance into the
pyramid has a possible dual meaning: redemption in the
Christian sense of passage through a purgatorial stage
that precedes salvation, also human sacrifice to the
ancient Aztec gods. But neither is affirmed by the
scenes in the pyramid or those that follow. Two deaths
are suggested: Elizabeth and Franz are lost in a cavein,
and later, Javier strangles Isabel. Still, Elizabeth,
Javier, Franz, and Isabel appear not to have changed, as
Isabel reveals that she had just seen them together; and
Franz is "sacrificed" by the narrator's Monks. Javier
and Elizabeth put his body in the trunk of the Monks' car
and leave Cholula for Mexico City— much as Cortes did.
In a letter to Sam Hileman, the novel's translator,
Fuentes explains his intention in A Change of Skin:
156 I
I
my intention was to underline that
the PAST (Cortes, Malinche, etc.) is SO much
more alive in Mexico than the present: that
the only thing alive in Cholula that day,
everyday, is its past, not its present.
In evoking the past, Fuentes is affirming the history of |
i
i
Mexico and articulating Mexico's unique mestizo voice.
With his eleventh novel, Christopher Unborn. Fuentes j
!
returns to Mexico City, and portrays the nation's j
I
cultural, historical, and ancient center in the year of
the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage— 1992. j
Through the invention of an array of satirical characters '
and situations, Fuentes embarks on a major critical !
statement about present-day Mexico in light of its
different pasts and the current corruption of its
cultural, historical, and religious symbols. 1
The novel is structured around a pregnancy and a j
contest for the one male child born on the exact
anniversary date of Columbus' arrival to the New World.
There are nine sections, corresponding to the nine months
of human gestation. The plot begins with the conception :
of the main character, who is also the narrator, and ends ,
I
with Christopher's birth, which is described with images j
I
that evoke Mexico's Aztec and Spanish past. Between j
j
these two moments, Christopher Unborn is a series of
I
i
157
trancos. From the Spanish picaresque tradition, trancos
are the series of adventures the picaro encounters that
provide the opportunity for satire. The trancos in
Christopher Unborn function in just this way. In the
course of the novel, Fuentes satirizes science, religion,
decadence, the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy, and the
overall degradation of Mexican history and culture.
At the moment of Christopher's conception, Angel,
Christopher's father, calls to his wife, Angeles, in this
way: J
!
Oh your Mexican ass my Angeles mia, the j
color of sweet quince, the smell of j
rotten mango and fresh red snapper, your
historical ass, Angeles, febrile and
Phoenician, dancing the Roman rumba,
Spanish and spunning, Turkissable,
Castilian and Moorish, tinged with
Aztec, nahuatl nalgas, Cordobuzzable
buttocks, Arab pillow of the almohades,
ass on horseback and ass on camelback,
second face-double cheeks— what is your
name? (7)
In cataloguing the cultural "ingredients" of the Mexican
mestizo culture, Fuentes is creating a grand burlesque.
The humor and the satirical tone illustrated here are
maintain throughout the novel.
All of the spiritually, emotionally, and j
psychologically rich religious and cultural symbols of I
Mexico have been reduced to a level of popular culture.
Their manifestations are incongruous, and their meaning
is almost nothing more than mere entertainment, mere
158
diversion. This is particularly evident in the situation
of the female symbols and figures of traditional Mexican
culture. The two major figures, the Aztec goddess !
i
Coatlicue and the Catholic counterpart Guadalupe, have j
s
been dissolved and collapsed into a horrendous— within
the Mexican context— but yet comical effigy: Mamadoc.
The initial description of her when she is presented to
the people reveals much: '
the perfect mix of Mae West. Coatlicue.
and the Virgin of Guadalupe. A symbol. |
The greatest human symbol ever invented:
THE MOTHER, j
The sweet name where biology acquires a
soul, where nature becomes transcendent
and where sex becomes history:
i
OUR HOLY MOTHER!!! j
And the minister offered his hand to the
incredible apparition as she reached the
last step;
i
GENTLEMEN: I PRESENT TO YOU OUR LADY 1
MAMADOC. (34) j
This figure is used to meet the need for a symbolic, but j
t
I
essentially meaningless, religious and cultural force.
Her appearance is unchallenged. !
The Revolution and its sad legacy still surfaces |
i
within this urban landscape of grotesque people and j
I
situations. Christopher's great-grandfather Palomar
becomes the character whose behavior is an opportunity
159
for Fuentes to pointedly criticize the lost ideals and
significance of the Revolution. In the passage that
follows, Fuentes comments on the Revolution, the current
bureaucracy, and does so with literary allusions to
Mariano Azuela and Juan Rulfo:
On afternoons, accompanied by his wife
Dona Susana Renteria, Grandfather Palomar
would climb up to the crest of a ridge
with a stone in his hand. He would then
toss the stone down the ravine and say to
his wife: "Look at that stone, the way
it goes on and on."
This madness of General Palomar made him
part of the national patrimony: the
government named him Eponymous Hero of
the Republic and the PRI gave orders that
he never be touched or bothered in any
way, an indispensable requirement in a
regime where unwritten law, as always,
was the personal whim of the man in
power. The fact is that my great
grandfather lived a quiet life: he
dedicated himself to administering
wisely the goods and chattels he'd
acquired honestly and lived out his
life in perfect sanity, except as
regards this matter of his
revolutionary madness and his
strange love for Dona Susana, who was
left to him in the will of a landowner
from Jalisco who had supported the
Cristero revolt. His name was Paramo
and he'd been arrested and murdered by
General Palomar's troops. (68)
In this world of madness, it is not surprising, perhaps,
that a major turning point in Mexico's history— the
ascendancy of the mestizaie— should also be reduced to
madness and mental rubble.
160
Yet for all the cultural "horrors” that abound in
1992 Mexico, Christopher occasionally reveals an antidote
that may work against the social environment that will
soon be his. At one point he says:
. . . I understand that whatever is is
provisional because the time and space
that precede me and whatever I know
about them I know only fleetingly, as
I pass, purely by chance, through this
hour and this place. The important
thing is that the syntheses never
finish, that no one save himself, ever,
from the contradiction of being in one
precise place and one precise time and
nevertheless thinking about a time and
place that are infinite, denying the end
of experience, maintaining open the
infinite possibilities for observing the
infinite events in the unfinished world
and transforming them as I observe them:
turning them into history, narrative,
language, experience, infinite reading
(63)
What Christopher expresses at the end of the passage can
also apply to Fuentes and the text of the novel itself.
The transforming capacity of language and the
imagination— the "inventing" capacity— may in the end be
what will save Mexico from absolute cultural loss.
While these three major urban novels by Fuentes
suggest a number of structural and conceptual
similarities to Dos Passos' novels, in his discussion of
his reading of Dos Passos, Fuentes reveals the
significant ways his novels, in being influenced by Dos
Passos, still diverge from the norteamericano. Fuentes'
161
understanding of the differences between the United
States and Mexico and between their modern novels is the
underlying point of departure for Fuentes.
162
CHAPTER V
"READING" THE LITERARY BIBLE:
JOHN DOS PASSOS AND CARLOS FUENTES
Dos Passos7 Manhattan Transfer and the three books
of his U.S.A. trilogy became, as Fuentes has stated, a
literary bible for the young Mexican novelist. The
analogy of a rich one and not such an exaggeration as may
first appear. The works by the North American novelist
served as a guide to narrative techniques that allow for
the representation of experience in a number of [
1
simultaneous ways. The four novels also provided an
critical understanding of American values and the
American way of life in the early part of the twentieth
century. The novels conveyed a perspective on history
and time that was unique in the American novel of the
t
thirties. And, most importantly, the novels revealed the j
possibilities of the novel form for the invention of
experience instead of merely accurately or realistically
recording it. With these elements found throughout the
pages of Dos Passos7 major novels, it should come as no
surprise that Fuentes discovered a form for narrating his
own understanding of Mexico and Mexico City in the mid-
to late-twentieth century. But Dos Passos also helped '
Fuentes to formulate his revolutionary view of the modern
163
novel and to see the potential of the form for the
purposes Fuentes wished to fulfill in his novels about
post-Revolution Mexico. Because of the guidance provided
by Dos Passos' novels, in helping Fuentes conceptualize
his own writing, the literary relationship between the
major novels of Dos Passos and those of Carlos Fuentes
illustrates the powerful dynamics of an international
literary influence, and, in the differences between their
works that Fuentes has pointed out, the dialectic of an
inter-American literary influence.
A literary influence reveals itself by means of
identifiable similarities in the literary works and by
solid evidence that the writer said to be influenced knew
of and was familiar with the other's works. If there is
only evidence of similarities, then the situation would
have to be treated as an analogy, or parallel historical
development. But the presence of similarities and proof
of familiarity establishes what comparatists refer to as
rapports de fait, what constitutes a true literary
influence. According to Ulrich Weisstein, rapports de
fait identifies, within comparative literary methodology,
the "factual links" or similarities between two national
literatures or the works of two writers (Comparative 6-
7). While a number of comparative studies stress just
the identification and cataloguing of these links and
164
similarities, influence studies do not limit their
treatment to just this. Starting with what constitutes
the rapports de fait, influence studies investigate the
basis for the harmony in deed that initially suggests the
presence of a literary influence.
As a number of researchers have found, Dos Passos'
major novels and those of Carlos Fuentes do exhibit
striking similarities. The novels share similarities in
structure: multiple protagonists and multiple running
narratives, fragmentary units, cinematic techniques. An
urban landscape dominates both writers' narratives. The
novels of both writers are concerned with history, time,
and social values. But the influence of Dos Passos on
Fuentes runs much deeper than these similarities would
indicate; in reading Dos Passos' major novels, Fuentes
encountered social and historical narratives that helped
him understand Mexican society, his own purposes at the
start of his writing career with La region mas
transparente f and the place of the modern Mexican novel
within the international arena of modernist fiction.
Fuentes understood that to make the Mexican novel share
the "language" of modern fiction would contribute to the
legitimacy of Mexico's mestizo culture by assuring its
entrance into the modern world. Mexico would enjoy equal
footing with the other modern nations of the world.
165
Fuentes explained the place of Dos Passos' influence
on his work and thought in a telephone interview given in
March of 1989 (a transcription of the interview appears
in the Appendix). For that interview, Fuentes was asked
very specific questions about his reading of Dos Passos'
major novels and how they affected the writing of his own
novels. The assumption underlying the interview was that
l
the influence of Dos Passos on Carlos Fuentes had
contributed to Fuentes' development as a novelist. The
belief was that the influence provided Fuentes with more
than just narrative technique. In his responses, Fuentes
emphasized four central inter-related conclusions he had
made about Dos Passos' novels and their relationship to
his own novels. These four conclusions are, one, the
possibilities within the modern novel that Dos Passos'
novels illustrated; two, the representation of society in
Dos Passos' novels and how this differs from Mexican
society, especially in Dos Passos' emphasis on economics
and sexuality, as this contrasts with Fuentes' emphasis
on economics and spirituality; three, time and memory,
which points up differences in urban experience and in
the understanding of Modernity; and, four, the literary
tradition of which their novels are a part.
In his response to the question of what contribution
Dos Passos' novels made in the formation of his own ideas
166
in the writing of La region mas transparente. Fuentes
describes his initial encounter with Dos Passos7 novels
and the conclusion he reached about the representation of
a city in the novel:
But this is one of the principal influences
in the original sense of presenting to me
the possibility of inventing a city
because I realized reading Dos Passos and
reading Balzac and reading Dickens . . .
and reading Dostoyevsky and Gogol that
writers do not reproduce cities they
invent cities. And for me Manhattan
Transfer was the invention of New York
City.
i
It was through Dos Passos' modern novel of the city that j
I
Fuentes became aware of the possibilities afforded the
novelist in the representation of the city.
The concept of "Inventing” is an important one for
Fuentes. It is one that he uses often in his discussions
f
i
of literature, language, and Latin America. As he uses
it in response to the first question of the interview, it
indicates a view of the novel that is not limited to the
documentary style, or factual recording, that had
dominated the Mexican novel, and had been exhausted after
the culmination of the novel of the Revolution in Azuela
and Guzman. "Invention," as the impetus of narrative J
I
representation, made La reaidn mas transparente— and j
Fuentes' other fiction— possible because Fuentes could
invent Mexico City— not record its factual state.
Fuentes could then combine the language of the Aztec and
1 67
Mayan myths about the "magic, the unknown, the grotesque"
that Rodriguez Monegal stresses, with the language that
points to concrete reality, which the ancient narrative
traditions also exalted.
The concept of "inventing" a novel appears to have
originated as a combination of Fuentes' own development
as a novelist and his understanding of European and
Mexican history. One of the points that Fuentes stresses
in the essay "How I Started to Write" is the realization
he made about imagining Mexico City from what his father
had told him before Fuentes actually saw it. Fuentes
described what he "invented" in his novels by saying
that:
[t]he Mexico of the forties and fifties
I wrote about in La region mds
transparente was an imagined Mexico, just
as the Mexico of the eighties and nineties
I am writing about in Cristobal Nonato
(Christopher Unborn1 is totally imagined.
I fear that we would know nothing of
Balzac's Paris and Dicken's London if
they, too, had not invented them ....
I had learned to imagine Mexico before I
ever knew it. (26-27).
Fuentes also uses the concept of "inventing" in his
description of the work of the Mexican historian Edmundo
O'Gorman. According to Fuentes, it is 0'Gorman who
writes that America was not discovered, but was invented
by an act of the imagination of the European Renaissance
("tradicion" 19). Dos Passos' novels become one of
168
several sources that contribute to Fuentes' view of
modern novel writing as an act of invention that results
in giving a recognizable form, and thus a substantive
reality, to a vital cultural element that otherwise lacks
materiality.
Manhattan Transfer was one of the earliest
influences on Fuentes' writing and on his understanding
of the novel, and he indicates this when he says that:
[Dos Passos] was one of the principal
influences I had from a very early age
because my father was a great reader of
Dos Passos when we were living in
Washington, D.C., because of the
political moment, because his star was
on the ascendancy in the 1930s. So by
the age of fourteen, I think, I read
Manhattan Transfer ....
Fuentes also details the connection— the genesis, in
fact— between the inception of La region mas transparente
i
and his reading of Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer:
. . . it was a great revelation to me, a
great shock to my mind that he [Dos Passos]
could write such a novel about a modern
city. So the inception of La reqibn mds
transparente as a city novel and the
reading of Manhattan Transfer I wouldn't
say that they're simultaneous events but
they're certainly parallel events in a way
and I read other novels of the city, of
course, before I wrote La reqidn mas
transparente ten years after that when I
was twenty-four.
Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer played a significant part,
along with other novels of the city as Fuentes indicates,
169
in directing Fuentes' thoughts and decisions about the
writing of his first novel.
Carlos Fuentes was also asked if Dos Passos' novels
had suggested any substantive elements that he later
included in his own novels. In response to his one
guestion, Fuentes stipulated that Dos Passos had led him
to several specific conclusions about Mexican society
during and after the Revolution:
I was really attracted [to Dos Passos]
. . . because I was living as a child in
the United States in Washington, D.C.,
in the New Deal era. And I found that
in Dos Passos there was the greatest
correspondence between the shape of the
novels and the content of the novels.
They reflected the creation of the U.S.A.
that reached its peak in the New Deal
Years. This was very important for me
as a political screen on which to project
my feelings about a parallel event south
of the border which was the Mexican
Revolution and the years of Lazaro
C&rdenas which coincided with the
Roosevelt years and then the decadence
of both movements, the decadence of the
New Deal through the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and the conservative
restoration in the United States and,
of course the decadence of the Mexican
Revolution through the years of Aleman
and industrialization and the rise of
the Mexican bourgeoisie in Mexico. So
there was a very close relationship that
of course helped me very, very much in
the writing of La reaidn mas transparente.
The political screen that Fuentes encountered in Dos
Passos' novels became a basis for coming to terms with
the political and social changes that have characterized
170
Mexico in the twentieth century after the Revolution.
The conclusions Fuentes reached have become the substance
of his treatment of the Revolution in his novels.
But the parallel historical events in the United
States and Mexico that Fuentes names here become in their
novels the basis of major cultural differences. The
failure of American capitalism that Dos Passos presents
in his novels is emphasized through the merging of
economic impulses with sexual drives. The promiscuity
that is a way of life for many of Dos Passos' characters
parallels the instability and recklessness of American
economic practices. Fuentes, on the other hand, equates,
in his novels, lost ideals of the Revolution with a lost
spirituality. In Mexican history, the presidency of
Cardenas was an affirmation of the mestizaie and the
enactment, finally, of the goals of the Revolution; the
decline of the ideals of the Cardenas presidency is
equivalent to a turning away from Mexico's Aztec soul and
true beginning.
This spiritual rootedness has also informed Fuentes'
understanding of cultural differences between the United
States and Mexico. In "How I Started to Write," Fuentes
details an experience from his childhood in Washington,
D.C. :
The United States had made me believe that
we live only for the future; Mexico,
171
Cardenas, the events of 1938 [when Cardenas
nationalized the oil companies in Mexico],
made me understand that only in an act of
the present can we make present the past
as well as the future: to be Mexican was
to identify a hunger for being, a desire
for dignity rooted in many forgotten
centuries and in many centuries yet to
come, but rooted here, now, in the
instant, in the vigilant time of Mexico
I later learned to understand in the
stone serpents of Teotihuacdn and in the
polychrome angels of Oaxaca. (8)
The significance of Mexico's many pasts for Fuentes in
recognizing what it means to be Mexican has become an
essential part of Fuentes' narratives; they evoke
Mexico's history to make it part of Mexico's present.
Dos Passos' social commentary also revealed to
Fuentes a further understanding of criticism in the urban
novel. Fuentes describes in this part of his response a
view of American society vis-A-vis Mexican society that
helped him in formulating his own understanding of
societies, their perception of time, and the role of
memory:
But there was a deeper sense of not only
celebration of the United States of the
New Deal years but the criticism of the
society as well. Modern societies
cannot celebrate themselves without
criticizing themselves. One goes with
the other. There is no absolute
consecration, in other words, of any
given society if it wants to call itself
modern. So my reading of John Dos Passos
ran side-by-side with my reading of
William Faulkner, in whom I found another
very deep influence and a very deep
resonance and a very deep distinction
172
which was the use of time in both
authors. For me, finally, there was a
sense of futility and extreme sadness in
the reading of John Dos Passos. That is
so only because most city novels are
novels of deceit in a way and because
they are led by the con man, whether his
name is Chichikov or Khlestakov or the
confidence man of Herman Melville or
Vautrin in the Balzac novels and any
of the numerous pfcaros in Dickens.
It was the sense that here was a society
in which the characters are unable to
administer their own time. Mary French,
J. Ward Morehouse, any of the anonymous
characters— no one in U.S.A. seems to be
able to create his own time. Everyone
is a victim of time. Good guys, bad
guys, it becomes secondary, irrelevant.
That is to say cannot create their time
and they all become the victims of
journalism. I think it was Sartre who
said that these are pages yellowed by
time, the pages of John Dos Passos.
Whereas the pages of Faulkner are
constantly recreating themselves
because the characters are shaping
their time. The novels and the
situations are a search and the
characters are a search for the novel
in situations and its characters
through a perpetual construction of
time. You have the impression of
reading John Dos Passos that it's all
over. That it happened in the past. You
have the impression of reading
Faulkner, even if it may happen in the
1860s, that it's going to happen. That
it's about to happen. That it's imminent.
It's a big difference that I made between
the two authors and it helped me a lot
in La regidn m&s transparente and in
The Death of Artemio Cruz y Cambio de
piel y en Cristobal Nonato you have the
sense of those times. The time that
destroys you, which is the time of Dos
Passos, and the time that you create,
which is the time of William Faulkner. Dos
Passos was important for me in a critical
sense in the past and today because it
173
finally gave me the vision of a society,
the society of the United States, with no
memory, a society that wants to forget its
history, that wants to look towards the
future; and because it has no memory it
relies totally on the media. Instead of
memory it has the media. And this
obligation to the media is, I think, a
great tragedy. Because finally when we
die, we don't lose our future, we lose
our past.
Fuentes mentions here five key issues: self-criticism
within modern societies, time as exemplified in Faulkner
and Dos Passos, the role of journalism, memory, and the
role of the media. For each one, major cultural
distinctions between the United States and Mexico can be
found, and these in turn reveal much about the influence
of Dos passos on Carlos Fuentes.
Dos Passos used the technigues of literary
modernism— juxtaposition, fragmented structures, montage,
open narratives, unheroic characters— to create novels of
unmatchable innovativeness that reflected a social
fragmentation. While Dos Passos expresses criticism of
urban America and of America in the early twentieth
century, the structural newness of his works echo the
emphasis on the "newness" of literature that has come to
characterize American literary modernism (Wagner-Martin
3, 4). Dos Passos' aesthetic principles of encracre and
deaacr^. being a part but also being separated from
174
history, determined the kind of social criticism his
novels would generate.
For Fuentes, however, as he was learning about the
relationships between literature, language, and society,
discovering Mexico's traditions was of the greatest
urgency. This he reveals in "How I Started to Write."
"For my generation in Mexico," Fuentes writes, "the
problem did not consist in discovering our modernity but
in discovering our tradition" (23). The stultifying
formal education Fuentes had earlier received had to give
way to an education that would, as Fuentes states, "bring
Cervantes back to life" (23). Novel writing soon became
for Fuentes "the transformation of experience into
history" (23).
Differences in the cultural concept of time between
the United States and Mexico can be found eloquently
l
stated by Octavio Paz in his essay "Mexico and the United
States," which he wrote in 1979 for The New Yorker.
Paz's discussion of the two nations' different view of 1
I
I
time stems from the absence in the United States and the
presence in Mexico of what he calls the "Indian element":
In the United States, the Indian element
does not appear. This, in my opinion,
is the major difference between our two
countries. The Indians who were not
exterminated were corralled in
'reservations.' The Christian horror of
'fallen nature' extended to the natives
of America: the United States was
1 7 5
founded on a land without a past. The
historical memory of Americans is
European, not American. For this reason,
one of the most powerful and persistent
themes in American literature, from
Whitman to William Carlos Williams and
from Melville to Faulkner, has been the
search for (or invention of) American
roots. We owe some of the major works
of the modern era to this desire for
incarnation, this obsessive need to be
rooted in American soil.
Exactly the opposite is true of Mexico,
land of superimposed pasts. Mexico City
was built on the ruins of Tenochtitldn,
the Aztec city that was built in the
likeness of Tula, the Toltec city that
was built in the likeness of Teotihuacan,
the first great city on the American
continent. Every Mexican bears within
him this continuity, which goes back two
thousand years. It doesn't matter that
this presence is almost always unconscious
and assumes the naive forms of legend and
even superstition. It is not something
known but something lived. The Indian
presence means that one of the facets of
Mexican culture is not Western. (362-
63)
Octavio Paz makes clear that the time of Dos Passos, what
Fuentes describes as "the time that destroys you," is the
time that results from the European sensibility, the time
of cultural non-rootedness. The time of Faulkner, what
Fuentes describes as "the time that you create," is the
time originating in the Indian past, the time of cultural
; rootedness and of myth. In Dos Passos' novels there is
I
j no mythic time, no redemptive time. But within Fuentes'
i
1 novels, a current of mythic, redemptive time is
I
I continuously realized through the present.16
When Fuentes states that the characters in U.S.A.
"become the victims of journalism," he is being critical
of the kind of journalism found in Dos Passos7 trilogy,
as well as what journalism means in Mexico. The
appearance in Dos Passos7 novels of the newspaper
headlines serves to construct a sense of the popular
thought of the day in reaction to the historical events
of the day, in other words to provide a sense of the
historical moment. To be a victim of this journalism is
to be a victim of the historical moment. In his comments
on the trilogy, Dos Passos has stressed that the
newspapers in his time were able to influence public
opinion with alarming ease, and this social fact he had
attempted to include in the U.S.A. with the headlines
that appear throughout the Newsreel segments. For Don
Passos, the novels serve as a criticism of the enormous
power of the newspapers. But Dos Passos7 characters are
still susceptible to this victimization by journalism.
They lack a critical perspective.
For Fuentes, the modern Latin American novel is a
corrective for the silences that journalism has
historically imposed in Latin America. In giving
narrative shape to the "silences" generated by
censorship, the novels provide the perspective needed to
offset the socially injurious effects of a controlled
177
press. Fuentes' criticism of the negative effects of
journalism become even more urgent in that American
journalism has now started to fill the "gap" left by a
limited press. Jorge G. Castaneda points out that in
Mexico "the American press has filled the void left by an
archaic, largely self-censored Mexican press,
significantly lacking in resources and credibility"
(332). The concern here is obvious; in their desire to
remain informed, Mexican readers of the American press
may experience the same conseguences that Dos Passos
records in U.S.A. They would be responding to bias and
misinformation instead of to accurate reporting.
, According to Castaneda, few Mexicans will disbelieve the
J
j American press even when it doesn't tell the truth (333).
I
i
The point that Fuentes raises about the lack of
i
memory in the Anglo-American consciousness is one that is
^ related to what Octavio Paz has described as the
I
differences in the concept of time between the two
nations. The lack of a collective memory contributes to
the tensions that have historically arisen between the
United States and Mexico. In "The Argument of Latin
America," Fuentes vehemently admonishes North Americans
for their poor memory. With a rich memory and sense of
history, conflicts between the two would decrease. In
defending the revolutionary movements in Latin America,
178
Fuentes reminds the North Americans that their history is
also one of revolution. Therefore, what they see in
Latin America should not alarm them. "You should start
remembering," Fuentes says,
You have a very bad memory. You would do
well to remember your own revolution in
the eighteenth century. You also had
your traitors, your deserters, and your
execution walls. Like all revolutions,
yours begot a counter-revolution. . . .
You expropriated the belongings and lands
of exiled people without paying them
! anything. You suppressed the pro-British
j press. You won the revolution with the
| help of a foreign power, France. . . .
j You used "exotic doctrines"— those of the
[ French encyclopedists— to form a republican
j government, a heresy against the status
quo imposed and defended by the Holy
Alliance. You were the devils, the
I heretics, the non-conformists of the
J eighteenth century. (19)
I
j In reminding North Americans of their own revolution,
I
Fuentes is also describing one of the major cultural
issues that separates the United States from Latin
America, and one that Fuentes began to recognize in his
reading of Dos Passos7 novels.
The brief reference that Fuentes makes to the media
at the end of his response is closely related to the
answer he gives to the last major question he is asked in
the interview. He is asked about the literary tradition
to which both he and Dos Passos belong. The response to
this question, like the response to the earlier question,
suggests a number of issues. He states that:
179
we are both part of the tradition of the
urban novel. The urban novel which,
according to Donald Fanger, is an
invention of romanticism because romanticism
has to create a place and a time for the
devil. And that place and time is the
city and the name of the devil is Fagan in
Oliver Twistf it's Vautrin in Illusions
Perdues. it's Chichikov in the Dead Souls.
etc., or Raskolnikov in Crime and
Punishment. But the creator of the city
is the devil. Ixca Cienfuegos plays that
role in La region mas transparente. I
don't know who plays it in Manhattan
Transfer. There's kind of an anonymity
in the sense of the city. There's a
sense of critique which perhaps does not
go far enough in saying this terrible
society is a creation of the devil
because there is no religiosity in Dos
Passos, I think. No sense of religion.
It's absent. . . .
And then you have to say that in the
city. I think that the tradition is
finally the tradition of the great
Spanish picaresque novel El diablo
coiuelo. el diablo cojuelo who takes
his characters flying over Madrid and
takes the rooftops off the city and
says "Let's look at the putrid cake of
j Madrid," el pasterdn podrido de Madrid,
j That is the tradition we both belong to,
i but there has to be a religious
1 dimension to it. I think it is absent
I in Dos Passos. I think it is one of
1 those things that Dos Passos lacks. He
does not realize that in society there
is someone who never sleeps, and that is
the devil.
Although Fuentes points out that Dos Passos and he
j rightly belong in the same tradition of the urban novel,
I
j the distinction Fuentes makes between the kinds of urban
, novels he and Dos Passos have written reveals a major
^ point of departure for Fuentes. Clearly the urban
180
experiences that Dos Passos directed his narrative
writing toward are not the ones that Fuentes has dealt
with in his novels.
North American writing, while critical in its
realistic structures, exists within what Fuentes calls "a
utopia of unlimited progress.1 ' This can be found in the
works by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis,
and John Dos Passos. Fuentes includes this point in the
essay "The Enemy: Words." Fuentes states that these
writers "criticized work conditions, Puritan morals,
middle-class vulgarity, but always within the circle of
optimism" (114); a solution or remedy could be found and
j most likely would be found. Perhaps this is why Fuentes
I , ,
I finds no devil m Dos Passos.
I
I
| Such a cultural attitude of optimism is not to be
f
; found in Latin America, especially in its recent history
I
l
! of urban development. The city as the Western image of
modernity, progress, and prosperity has become an image
of decay and unrest (LaFrance 219-20). This phase of
modern Latin American history has been marked by a kind
of psychic violence that stems from conflicting values
struggling within the urban experience. In one sense
i
j this conflict is one of "cultural authenticity," as
| Elizabeth Lowe describes it. In her description of this
181
conflict, she also includes the cultural positions of the
writer and the critic vis-a-vis urban development:
Urbanization is the major social, economic
and political phenomenon of twentieth-
century Latin America. . The writer has
generally been more keenly aware than the
critic of the importance of the city to
his work. . . . the writer has turned the
urban-rural conflict into a problem of
cultural authenticity. For the writer,
this argument has taken shape as a
dialectical process, a tension-filled ;
opposition that seeks ultimately to f
reconcile two major interacting forces of j
Latin American cultural identity: the ;
urge to become part of the international
intellectual community, and the instinct
to preserve what is indigenous to the !
Latin American experience (14) |
i
The struggle for cultural authenticity that Lowe j
describes here is clearly not an issue for the North i
t
American urban experience. The city for Dos Passos and 1
t
his generation still held out tremendous possibilities
i for individual and social progress.
1 i
j The conflict that Lowe describes surfaces as well in
j a second way, as resistance against the encroachment of ■
i
i North American culture into Mexico and the other Latin
|
! American countries, and much of this encroachment has
occurred through the media. Alan Riding has pointed out
i
] in his study of the Mexicans that popular entertainment
* in that country has "become a broad avenue for cultural
: penetration by the United States" (307). In fact, he
i
states that "television is now the principal influence on !
182
the cultural, political and economic attitudes of the
population at large" (315), and North American
programming dominates in Mexico. In describing the
content of television programming, which is controlled by
I
1 Televisa, Riding emphasizes the effect on the viewers of
the flood of images from North America:
I . . . Televisa was "denationalizing" the
i country by presenting the American way of
i life as a new ideal reachable through
i obsessive consumption. Most telenovelas
j deal with unreal wealthy families; cartoons,
j crime stories and movies shown on Mexican
■ television are made in— and portray life
| in— the United States; and studies show
} that the favorite television personalities
I of young boys are Superman, Spiderman,
j and Batman and of young girls, Wonder
‘ Woman. American football and baseball
] enjoy more airtime in Mexico than
I soccer. In the hands of American
] advertising companies, about half the
I models used on television are European
j or American in appearance, including
many seductive blue-eyed blondes. In a
country where less than 5 percent of the
population is of pure Caucasian blood,
the message is that things go better for
white fair-haired "foreigners" than for
the short dark Mexicans. Advertising
also concentrates on such nonessentials
; as liquor, beer and cosmetics and, for
children, candies, cakes, chewing gums
and sodas of minimal nutritional value.
(313-14)
Riding's account powerfully indicates that American
consumer culture is enjoying enormous influence in
Mexico, such that the new middle class and the urban poor
I
j are increasingly replacing the old folk culture of Mexico
! "with more aggressive, consumerist and imported
183
entertainment" (308). Indeed, at times Mexican society
seems overwhelmed with the pervasiveness of the United
States cultural presence (Meyer 294). Carlos Fuentes has
explained this phenomenon as well when he says that
"Latin American becomes an expendable world for
imperialism" ("Enemy" 121).
Maintaining cultural authenticity in Latin America
is the impetus for the kind of novel Fuentes set out to
i
j write. In doing so, he resists the effects of Anglo-
j American cultural and literary dominance. He affirms
I
| Mexico's distinct voice and district history, and he also
accomplishes something else. Through his novels, an
alterative perspective on the modern world is
established. And Fuentes sees multiplicity of
perspective as essential for a vigorous critical stance
i
that societies need for their intellectual and cultural
health. This multiplicity is what Fuentes argues for in
his essay "The End of Ideologies?" What he calls "a
relentless self-criticism made possible only through
multiple ideologies can reverse the trend toward global
oneness, with capitalism the sole ideology. He states
that:
The kingdom of ideological oneness, devoid
of competition or criticism, portends the
I worst, the insidious and implacable of
dictatorships. According to Joseph
Brodsky's prediction, this would be the
kind of dictatorship in which money alone
| 184
J would unify the world, the differences
j among the nations being determined by
j their individual rates of monetary
exchange. (27)
| In asserting Mexico's unique cultural voice, Fuentes
<
i makes an effort to provide the perspective that fosters
cultural self-criticism for America and the West.
I
i
I In calling Dos Passos his "literary bible," Fuentes
1 suggested three possible meanings: one, the bible as a
i
i
I basis for living, a moral path? two, the bible as a basis
I for writing, an aesthetic guide? three, the bible as a
j
basis for understanding experience, a perspective. As a
literary influence, Dos Passos' novels provided a portion
! of all three. Combined, they fused with the literary
I
I tradition of Mexico, along with Fuentes' own view of
I
literature and of its crucial role in modern Latin
America to help give shape to the experience of Mexico in
the modern world. Fuentes, therefore, may be said to
j exemplify a postmodern perspective that incorporates but
i
! also transcends Dos Passos' modern perspective. As he
I
I does in The Buried Mirror. Fuentes asks that a new way of
j reading given by Cervantes and a new way of seeing given
i
j by Valasquez now be the cornerstone of cultural awareness
i
i and inter-relations.
i
i
j
t
i
185 i
I
i
NOTES I
xBy Latin America I mean the Spanish- and
Portuguese-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere
that lie south of the Rio Grande River. In contrast,
j North America refers to only the United States of
1 America.
2Book-length biographical accounts include works by
George J. Becker, John H. Wrenn, and Virginia Spencer
I Carr.
f 3Book-length biographical accounts include works by
Daniel deGuzman, Wendy Faris. Crossing Borders: The
Journey of Carlos Fuentes also provides a history of
j Fuentes' life and work.
I
I
! “Dagoberto Fuentes discusses in his dissertation the
J issue of lost Revolutionary ideals and The Death of
: Artemio Cruz.
! ---------------
sElena Poniatowska provides a chilling account of
this painful incident in modern Mexican history.
i
6See deGuzman (93-93) for a discussion of the
relationship between Fuentes and Reyes. It is Reyes who
suggested to Fuentes the title for his first novel.
Fuentes discusses Alfonso Reyes in "How I Started to •
Write" (18-19, 23). !
’Among those who question either the concept of ;
literary influence or the methodologies in determining
and analyzing a literary influence are Rene Welleck, who
argues that Remak's definition is full of "artificial and
untenable distinctions" (3); and Ihab Hassan, who finds
the concept of literary influence problematic, preferring
instead to use the concepts of Tradition and Development
rather than literary influence. Anna Balakian (in !
Aldridge, et al 146-149) questions the use of the term
and personally prefers "literary fortune" as the starting 1
point for the study of what other comparatists call
literary influence.
®Ulrich Weisstein constructs a hierarchy of literary
relationships that would fall under the category within
comparative literary study of a literary influence:
I: Borrowings (quotations; pastiche, "cento")
186
II: Translations
III: Adaptations
IV: Imitations
| a) serious (including stylization)
b) humorous/critical (including parody,
travesty and burlesque)
V: Influences ("rapports de fait").
("Influences" 597)
9Eagleton's recent work Ideology: An Introduction ]
provides an extensive discussion of the different uses ;
and meanings of the term. !
10In addition to McLelIan's history of the term j
ideology in philosophy and political writing, two helpful
histories of the term in literary study are by Lennard J. ,
Davis and Myra Jehlen. j
i
“Discussions of the political and social movements
in America during the first part of the twentieth century
can be found in studies by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser,
Daniel Aaron, and Richard H. Pells.
! “Donald Pizer in Twentieth-Century American Library
; Naturalism: An Interpretation discusses Dos Passos'
; U.S.A. as literary naturalism.
; “Dos Passos' interest in the Spanish novelist
Baroja has been noted by scholars. Emily Becker Golson,
for one, devotes her dissertation to Dos Passos and
Baroja, and emphasizes their development as political j
novelists.
“Dos Passos' interest in history and his I
significance as a historical chronicler has not been
overlooked by historians. John David Baker, for example, |
argues in his dissertation that "John Dos Passos' pen ;
portraits of real and fictional radical characters . . . I
[a] hitherto neglected aspect of his work makes a |
significant contribution to American social history" '
(3191—A). I
“See Donald Pizer's analysis of the structure of
Dos Passos' U.S.A. in Dos Passos' U.S.A.: A Critical
Study.
187
“Elizabeth Lowe points out that Faulkner's
characters are mythic because of the extreme violence
that marks their lives (17). This mythic quality may
account for the tremendous appeal Faulkner has had in
Latin America.
I
I
188
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36.
APPENDIX
Telephone Interview with Carlos Fuentes,
Tuesday, March 21, 1989
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
j Fuentes:
I
J
i
I would just like to ask you the questions
I sent on the second letter. Is that all
right?
Yeah, sure.
My first question is what made Dos Passos'
novels so appealing to you?
Well, there are a number of factors. You
mentioned most of them. They were
literary and they were political.
Okay, I was hoping you'd say that second
one.
Yeah.
Could you expand on the political a little
bit?
It's coming in a lot of your questions.
Let me ask you the second one then. How
did his novels, Manhattan Transfer and the
trilogy, contribute to the formation of
your own ideas in the writing of La region
mas transparente?
It was one of the principal influences I
had from a very early age, because my
father was a great reader of Dos Passos
when we were living in Washington, D.C.,
because of the political moment because
his star was on the ascendancy in the
1930s. So by the age of fourteen, I
think, I read Manhattan Transfer, and it
was a great revelation to me, a great
shock to my mind that he could write such
a novel about a modern city. So the
inception of La reaidn mas transparente as
a city novel and the reading of Manhattan
Transfer I wouldn't say that they're
simultaneous events but they're certainly
parallel events in a way; and I read other
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
202 |
I
novels of the city, of course, before I |
wrote La reaidn mas transparente ten years !
after that, when I was twenty-four. But J
this is one of the principal influences in |
the original sense of presenting to me the i
possibility of inventing a city. Because
I realized reading Dos Passos, and reading
Balzac, and reading Dickens, and reading
[?] St. Petersburg and reading Dostoyevsky 1
and Gogol that writers do not reproduce
cities— they invent cities! And for me
Manhattan Transfer was the invention of
New York City.
All right. My third question is did Dos
Passos suggest only a narrative shape for
your ideas as other scholars have !
suggested? In other words, he gave you j
some substance as well as some techniques '
to follow? !
No, no. It's both things because I go to
your final question, were you attracted to
the criticism in Dos Passos concerning
American politics and economics because
they are very, very related. I was really
attracted as I said a moment ago because I
was living as a child in the United States
in Washington, D.C., in the New Deal era.
And I found that in Dos Passos there was j
the greatest correspondence between the
shape of the novels and the content of the |
novels. They reflected the creation of ;
the U.S.A. that reached its peak in the j
New Deal years. This was very important |
for me as a political screen on which to !
project my own feelings about a parallel
event south of the border, which was the
Mexican Revolution and the years of Lazaro
Cardenas, which coincided with the
Roosevelt years, and then the decadence of
both movements, the decadence of the New
Deal through the Cold War, McCarthyism,
and the conservative restoration in the j
United States and, of course, the i
decadence of the Mexican Revolution I
through the years of Aleman and
industrialization, and the rise of the
Mexican bourgeoisie in Mexico. So there
was a very close relationship that, of
203
course, helped me very, very much in the
writing of La reaidn m£s transparente.
But there was a deeper sense of not only
celebration of the United States of the
New Deal years but the criticism of the
society as well. Modern societies cannot
celebrate themselves without criticizing
themselves. One goes with the other.
There is no absolute consecration, in
other words, of any given society if it
wants to call itself modern. So my
reading of John Dos Passos ran side-by-
side with my reading of William Faulkner,
in whom I found another very deep
influence and a very deep resonance and a
very deep distinction, which was the use
of time in both authors. For me, finally,
there was a sense of futility and extreme
sadness in the reading of John Dos Passos.
That is so only because most city novels
are novels of deceit in a way and because
they are led by the con man, whether his
name is Chichikov or Khlestakov or the
confidence man of Herman Melville or
Vautrin in the Balzac novels and any of
the numerous picaros in Dickens. It was
the sense that here was a society in which
the characters were unable to administer
their own time. They cannot create their
own time. Mary French, J. Ward Morehouse,
any of the anonymous characters— no one in
U.S.A. seems to be able to create his own
time. Everyone is a victim of time. Good
guys, bad guys— -it becomes secondary,
irrelevant. That is to say they cannot
create their time, and they all become the
victims of journalism. In a way, the
novels finally become journalism. I think
it was Sartre who said that these are
pages yellowed by time, the pages of John
Dos Passos. Whereas the pages of Faulkner
are constantly recreating themselves
because the characters are shaping their
time. The novels and the situations are a
search, and the characters are a search,
for the novel in situations and its
characters through a perpetual
construction of time. You have the
impression of reading John Dos Passos that
it's all over. That it happened in the
204
!
i
!
Chavarria:
i
| Fuentes:
i
1
past. You have the impression reading
Faulkner, even if it may [have] happen[ed]
in the 1860s, that it's going to happen.
That it's about to happen. That it's
imminent. It's a big difference that I
made between the two authors, and it
helped me a lot because in La region mds
transparente and in The Death of Artemio
Cruz y Cambio de piel y en Cristobal
Nonato you have the sense of those times:
the time that destroys you, which is the
time of Dos Passos, and the time that you
create, which is the time of William
Faulkner. Dos Passos was important for me
in a critical sense in the past and today
because it finally gave me the vision of a
society, the society of the United States,
with no memory, a society that wants to
forget its history, that wants to look
towards the future and because it has no
memory it relies totally on the media.
Instead of memory it has the media. And
this obligation to the media is, I think,
a great tragedy. Because finally when we
die, we don't lose our future, we lose our
past.
All right. There's just one more that I
don't think you have touched upon yet.
It's the second to the last one. If you
and Dos Passos are parts of a tradition,
how would you describe Dos Passos' place
in that tradition in relationship to
yours?
Okay. I think we are both parts of the
tradition of the urban novel. The urban
novel which, according to Donald Fanger,
is an invention of Romanticism because
Romanticism has to create a place and a
time for the devil. And that place and
time is the city, and the name of the
devil is Fagan in Oliver Twist, its
Vautrin in Illusions Perdues, it's
Chichikov in the Dead Souls, etc., or
Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. But
the creator of the city is the devil.
Ixca Cienfuegos plays that role in La
region mds transparente. I don't know who
plays it in Manhattan Transfer. There's
20b
kind of an anonymity in the sense of the
city. There's a sense of critique which
perhaps does not go far enough in saying
this terrible society is a creation of the
devil because there is no religiosity in
Dos Passos, I think. No sense of
religion. It's absent.
Chavarria:, No, none at all.
Fuentes: And then you have to say that in the city.
I think that the tradition is finally the
tradition of the great Spanish picaresque
novel El diablo coiuelo. el diablo cojuelo
who takes his characters flying over
Madrid and takes the rooftops off the city
and says "Let's look at the putrid cake of
Madrid," el pasterdn podrido de Madrid.
That is the tradition we both belong to,
but there has to be a religious dimension
to it. I think it is absent in Dos
Passos. I think it is one of those things
that Dos Passos lacks. He does not
realize that in his society there is
someone who never sleeps, and that is the
devil.
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Okay. I have a few short questions. Do
you have a few minutes?
Yeah, yeah.
I haven't been able to find material on
this. Did you ever meet Dos Passos?
I saw him in Mexico City. El Fondo de
Cultura Economica threw a party for him in
the 1950s when I hadn't published a single
work and there he was, old and bald and
big and with a pipe and baggy and with
thick glasses, and I was shaking all over
because there was Dos Passos. So I just
shook hands with him. I wasn't able to
say a word.
I have noticed that in Casa con dos
puertas that you make very brief reference
to Dos Passos. Have you written on him
anywhere else?
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
i
! Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
! Chavarria:
i
i
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
206
No, no. I don't think I have said more.
The longest thing that I have said about
Dos Passos is what I'm telling you.
Okay. Are there any notes that you took
while you were reading Dos Passos and of
the writing of La region mds transparente? i
i
Yes, there are. They are in my archive j
and they are in the back pages of the
books themselves.
Are your papers deposited anywhere yet?
I think I am going to give them to
Princeton, but this has to be worked out.
Oh, I see. So they are not in a sense :
available yet for scholars? j
No, they are not. |
Okay. Let me see. I think that is all I |
really need to ask you. . .
Well good.
. . . for this. I appreciate this very !
much. Could I ask you two questions about
your own work? j
Yes, sure. !
What kinds of goals remain for you as a J
writer?
i
I
Well, you know if you look at my latest
novels you'll find a whole table of ;
contents there of the novels that I have
written and that I plan to write and the 1
place that they occupy. Some of the
novels I've written come after the novels,
in their organic position, after the !
novels I plan to write. So I'm writing 1
many of the novels. You know you end up
writing your first novels at the end
because you don't know how to write them
when you are young. So I'm finally i
writing the novels that I wanted to write j
Chavarria:
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
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j
Fuentes:
Chavarria:
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i
! Fuentes:
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I
| Chavarria:
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l
j Fuentes:
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! Chavarria:
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j Fuentes:
i Chavarria:
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Fuentes:
Chavarria:
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i Fuentes:
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207
when I was young and that's what I'm doing
now.
Is there one particular work you are most
proud of or satisfied with at this point?
No, no, because what I'm telling you.
It's an organism and it's an ensemble. I
couldn't take out any of the mosaics so
the whole would fall apart.
And just one more question— are there any
kinds of limitations you put on material
you provide through an interview as to
their use? For example, can I indicate,
let's say, to my community college paper
that I was given an interview with you?
Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course.
I just wanted to check with you. Well I
think that's all. You have helped me
tremendously.
I'm glad, I'm glad. I wish you great luck
in this.
Thank you. Would you like me to send you
a transcript or copies of anything?
Would you?
All right, I will.
Yes, would you do that?
I will do that. And if it's all right
with you I might ask you in the course of
sending you the transcript any changes
that you think I should make in what I
write up.
Yes, let's do that. Sure. I'll be
expecting that and lot's of luck in your
work.
Thank you. Should I send it to the Mexico
City address?
Yes, send it here.
Chavarria: All right. Thank you very much then,
Fuentes: Good bye.
Chavarria: Good bye now.
(Transcription: September 23, 1991)

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